As The Everyman’s major revival of Brian Friel’s materpiece Making History opens this April, we have invited Dr Jane Ohlmeyer to discuss the play.
‘About Making History’ by Dr Jane Ohlmeyer
Making History, a play by Brian Friel which was first performed in 1988, is set at the end of the sixteenth century on the eve of the Nine Years War, which began in 1594 and ended in 1603. For the most part it takes place in Dungannon in County Tyrone in Ulster, which was the most geographically remote – from London – of the four Irish provinces. In the play, Friel tells the story of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and hereditary overlord of Ulster, who led the Irish war-effort against Elizabeth I and went on to become the symbolic hero of Irish nationalism.
The play opens in 1591 with the elopement and marriage of O’Neill, now aged 41, to his third wife, Mabel Bagenal, who is barely 20. This focus on intermarriage – between native and newcomer, Catholic and Protestant – immediately complicates understandings of what it meant (and means) to be ‘Irish’ and ‘English’. Friel conjures up O’Neill’s intense relationship with Mabel and her sister, Mary, daughters of the local Protestant planter, Sir Nicholas Bagenal, and their brother, Sir Henry, who was the ‘Queen’s Marshall’ from nearby, Newry, and leader of the ‘New English’ community in Ulster.
Issues of gender, family and identity are at the fore. Some of the strongest dialogue in the play is between the two women as they discuss what constitutes ‘improvement’ and ‘civility’. Making History also vividly imagines the world of Gaelic Ulster, just as the English state set out to conquer, colonise, cultivate, and ‘civilise’. Friel invites us to eavesdrop on O’Neill’s discussions with Red Hugh O’Donnell, his closest ally and son-in-law, who has recently escaped from Dublin castle, where he had been incarcerated for nearly five years. Friel rightly emphasises the importance of lineage, kinship, fosterage, and marriage alliances. Equally insightful were O’Neill’s deliberations about ‘Englishness’, both with Mabel and his trusted friend, foster brother, and private secretary, Harry Hovenden.
Even if Friel’s focus is the local, he never loses sight of the wider contexts of England, Scotland, and especially Spain and the Papacy, from where O’Neill and O’Donnell secured support for their Catholic ‘crusade’. Archbishop Peter Lombard embodied these connections with Catholic Europe. He was a distinguished theologian and, as O’Neill’s first biographer, began the cult of O’Neill as national saviour. In the play most of O’Neill’s exchanges with Lombard – first in Dungannon and later in Rome – focus on the meaning of history and allow Friel to complicate the nationalist myth of O’Neill as the symbolic hero of Irish nationalism.
In the final scene of the play, O’Neill, having left Ireland in 1607 as part of what is now known as the ‘Flight of the Earls’, is in Rome with Lombard. Broken and blind, O’Neill insists that the archbishop tell his life story exactly as it happened. Of course, by putting it all in – “the schemer, the leader, the liar, the statesman, the lecher, the patriot, the drunk, the soured, bitter émigré” – Making History challenges the myth of Hugh O’Neill as a national hero.
Instead Friel portrays O’Neill as a complex man, redolent with ambiguity, who flitted between two very different and competing worlds. He was a powerful Gaelic lord – the O’Neill who valued his kin, lineage, culture, and religion. He was also an English earl, comfortable with the language and trappings of England, a friend to English men, a lover of English women, and a servant of an English queen. Friel also imbues O’Neill with qualities – ambition, ruthlessness, hybridity, pragmatism, passion, charm, and charisma – that make him accessible and human. Finally, Friel renders O’Neill as a leader who was willing to negotiate, to accommodate, to compromise, to survive, and to reconcile.
Jane Ohlmeyer is the Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin and author of Making Empire. Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2023), which features Making History.
Making History by Brian Friel
The Everyman is proud to present a major revival of Brian Friel’s masterpiece about resistance, revolution and the remaking of heroes, directed by The Everyman’s new Artistic Director Des Kennedy in his inaugural season.
First performed by Field Day in 1988, the play follows Gaelic leader Hugh O’Neill in the events before and after the Battle of Kinsale and examines who gets to decide how history is recorded, told and retold.
