As The Everyman’s major revival of Brian Friel’s materpiece Making History opens this April, we have invited Dr Mark Phelan to discuss history, narratives and the play.
‘History Isn’t Over Yet…’ by Dr Mark Phelan
“There’s more to the truth than facts”
– Owen McCafferty, Quietly
“Henry Joy McCracken: People do forget. They forget the facts that don’t suit them.
Mary Bodle: They forget nothing in this country, not ever.
Henry Joy McCracken: …It’s far worse than that. They misremember everything.”
– Stewart Parker, Northern Star
A decade ago, my daughter arrived home from her new secondary school with some history homework that she has long since regretted showing me. A short assignment, it required her class to compose brief biographies extolling the epic exploits of the intrepid English explorer, Sir Francis Drake. For this purpose, an array of aggrandising primary and secondary sources were provided; all attesting to Drake’s picaresque life as he sailed from Plymouth to plunder the Pacific as the ‘Queen’s Pirate’. Peculiarly absent, however, was any acknowledgment of how this exotic figure, famous for his circumnavigation of the globe, had far closer connections to Ireland, albeit altogether less illustrious ones, in the form of exterminating the entire civilian population of Rathlin Island in 1575. Although her school in Belfast burnishes its ecumenical educational ethos and ‘liberal’ reputation as much as it boasts of its rugby prowess, this apparent bout of historiographical amnesia, much to her bemusement, left me incandescent over its reduction of history to hagiography and wilful blindness to our complex colonial past, whereby the Elizabethan era, as experienced in Ireland, was one of genocidal violence.
Though I railed against the failure to acknowledge Drake the rapacious slaver and privateer, my own views were perhaps as tendentious as any teachers’; especially as we’d just returned from holiday on Rathlin. It was on this remote basaltic island off the Ballycastle coast that Sir Francis Drake, at the behest of Lord Essex (Hugh O’Neill’s ally at the time!) helped butcher 600 kith and kin of Sorley Boy MacDonnell and his men; mostly women and children, who had been secreted to Rathlin for security and sanctuary. Those surviving the initial assault on the island’s feeble fortifications fled; hiding in the hundreds of the caves and caverns honeycombing Rathlin’s ragged coast where they were remorselessly “hunted out as if they had been seals or otters”. Reportedly, Sorley Boy from the Antrim shore, heard the screams of the slaughtered carry across the Sea of Moyle to Torr Head so that, “tearing and tormenting himself that he there lost all that he had”, Sorley Boy went mad with grief; as Essex gleefully records in correspondence with Queen Elizabeth, who enthusiastically endorsed Essex’s ruthless efficacy in pacifying the recalcitrant Irish (and Scots).
Making History opens in 1591, shortly after Hugh O’Neill’s mixed marriage to Mabel Bagenal and a mere sixteen years after this massacre on Rathlin, but both bride and groom share a strange connection to its sanguinary history. And so, with the imprimatur of Peter Lombard, who suggests “the life of Hugh O’Neill can be told in many different ways”, allow me to gently pull on this loose historical thread.
After all, there are no such thing as coincidences with a consummate craftsman like Friel and it’s not insignificant that Sir Francis Drake fleetingly appears: namechecked in Hugh’s nostalgic monologue in which he fondly recalls his fostered childhood in the English household of Sir Henry Sidney: “the only father I ever knew”. Hugh warmly remembers the ritual of post-dinner debates when the most pressing issues of the day would be discussed with distinguished guests like Drake, “gross men; vain men”, in attendance: an experience that profoundly shapes the protean politics of the precocious young earl. However, Hugh’s sentimental portrait of such a benevolent Sir Henry seems suspect; something impossible to reconcile with the barbarity with which he waged the Tudor campaign to subjugate Ireland. Indeed, he was just as guilty as his ‘gross’ dinner party guest, Sir Francis Drake, having participated in an even earlier massacre on Rathlin in 1557; an atrocity elliptically recorded in his memoir: “we landed more politiquely and safely, and encamped in the isle until we spoiled the same of all mankind, corn and cattle in it.” Spoiled, being the altogether more civilised synonym for “slaughtered”. This mass killing, undertaken by Hugh’s supposed foster father, was a reprisal for a previously repelled assault on Rathlin that was led, in yet another curious intertextual twist, by Sir Ralf Bagenal, the uncle of Hugh’s new bride, Mabel.
Rathlin’s population recovered from both massacres only to endure an even greater atrocity in 1642, when Covenanter Campbell soldiers slaughtered hundreds – perhaps thousands – of local Catholic MacDonalds. This time, the screams of the slain were recorded in something more substantial than Sir Henry’s evasive memoirs or the faded memory of Sorley Boy’s madness, for they are literally inscribed in the island’s deceptively bucolic landscape as its picturesque scenery is etymologically depth-charged by the haunting dinnseanchas of its placenames which record harrowing acts of historical violence. Bruach an Bhriste Chroidhe (the Slope of the Heart Break) elegiacally alludes to the unimaginable horror that’s lividly explicit in Cnoc na Scriodlaine, ‘hill of the screaming’: where the women and children of the island were herded to helplessly watch their menfolk butchered below in Lag an Bhriste Mhóir ‘the Hollow of the Great Defeat’, before they themselves were marched by pitiless soldiers to Sloc na gCailleach, ‘Chasm of the Women’, to be plunged to their deaths on the rocks below…
Of course, these interlinked themes of language and landscape, history and memory richly marble Friel’s masterpiece, Translations, and its dramatisation of how the Ordnance Survey’s anglicisation of Irish placenames as part of a cartographic project had profound colonial consequences in effecting a literal and linguistic “form of eviction”. Some historians fiercely criticised Translations; condemning Friel for some factual inaccuracies, though he demurred these were but “tiny bruises on history”, archly noting: “you don’t go to Macbeth for history”. Performed several years later, Making History is an even more substantial right-of-reply by Friel for whom “the imperatives of fiction are as exacting as the imperatives of cartography and historiography”. Produced for Field Day Theatre Company, Friel’s play acts as a form of metahistory; it’s a play that literally stages the historiographical process itself, exposing audiences to the structural forces and fictional strategies that shape the work of all historians, whether they care to acknowledge it or not.
In 1988, however, with the conflict in the North deadlocked in a military and sectarian stalemate, contested narratives over our colonial history were embittered further by febrile rows over revisionism that embroiled historians, critics, artists and journalists alike. In this fractious period, it should be remembered that even so enlightened a figure as Colm Tóibín could scandalously state: “There were times in the 1980s when it was hard not to feel that Field Day had become the literary wing of the IRA”. Thirty years later, Tóibín’s slanderous statement is utterly scalding to read; especially as lawyers, civic leaders, and elected representatives were targeted and killed for the same charge after being tarred ‘fellow travellers” of the Provos. Thirty years later, however, Friel’s ‘play-full’ riposte to revisionism and professional historians critical of Translations’ factual inaccuracies has aged better, possessing a compelling political voltage that resonates today. Although the play refracts contemporaneous colonial anxieties about identity, race and belonging that proliferated in the Tudor era as successive monarchs strove to violently subjugate a land riven by competing claims of ownership amongst warring Gaelic clans, Old English and ‘upstart Planters’, many of these issues remain valent today, albeit in a different register. In the North, the legacy of such competing claims and contested histories continues to blight post-conflict society, whilst in the South, they have acquired a different political resonance with the emergence of a nativist right-wing politics in response increased immigration, as Ireland has been transformed in recent decades from an island of emigrant emissaries to an immigrant host.
Friel deftly encodes these disputes in language; in the botanical badinage of the Bagenal sisters, Mabel and Mary, as they discuss their father’s herb garden and orchards back ‘home’ in Newry, with the latter admonishing her apostate sister not to “plant the fennel near the dill or the two will cross-fertilize… you’ll end up with a seed that neither one thing or the other”. The imagery and ideas with which Friel imbues these filial exchanges is so charged that even their seemingly innocuous conversation is freighted with imperial concerns of conquest and miscegenation. Equally, Hugh O’Neill, admiring the sprays of lemon-yellow bloom of the Spanish broom that he arranges in the opening scene of the play, is utterly oblivious to the fact that this genista – like its beholder – is an exotic import: it only exists in the wild having escaped from the walled gardens cultivated by English settlers. Broom swiftly became naturalised in Ireland in the sixteenth-century, and though its presence is so startling new to Hugh, audiences today would share none of his surprise for Spanish broom has taken root all over Ireland, blending in with its less fragrant cousin, Scotch broom; its papilionaceous flowers which proliferate all summer almost indistinguishable from those of our native yellow gorse.
Though broom was adopted as the dynastic emblem of the English royal line of Plantagenets, it is an apt, if ironic, image for O’Neill himself: a complex, contradictory figure who was very much a cultural and linguistic hybrid. O’Neill spent much of his childhood fostered by an English family within ‘the Pale’ as a ward of the crown, which sought to cultivate a ‘civilised’ Gaelic chieftain who could be later transplanted as a vassal leader, loyal to the Queen. Contrary to popular belief, he was not reared in England as the “curled darling of the court” though this notion is repeated by Friel who relied heavily on Seán Ó Faoláin’s biography which invented this fiction. Ironically, Ó Faoláin’s frequently fanciful, even fantastical, embellishment of O’Neill’s life has proven enormously influential in shaping the historiography of this iconic figure, in spite of its numerous factual inaccuracies. Perhaps Ó Faoláin felt his “first responsibility will be to tell the best possible narrative”, just as Lombard describes his approach to writing the history of O’Neill. Given that Making History places centre-stage the invidious and explicit forces that (mis)shape how history is recorded, its author’s complicity in reproducing the myth of O’Neill appears inadvertently appropriate!
Re-reading Making History, it is the trivial memory of my daughter’s history homework rather than the play’s finer philosophical or political themes that has lodged like a burr in my brain. Though only an anecdote, it illustrates how problematic a partial (in both senses of the word) engagement with the past can be. After all, the omission of Drake’s darker side, or indeed that of an entire Elizabethan era of “exploration and expansion”, is more than any mere anomaly of school curricula, or the oversight of an individual teacher; it is evidence of how selective forms of historiographical amnesia endure today in terms of how history is taught and learned, recorded and remembered. As O’Neill repeatedly asks of his historian Lombard, “You’ll tell the truth?”, only for the latter to wonder “are truth and falsity the proper criteria” when “imagination will be as important as information”.
Equally important as truth telling and showing fidelity to the facts, is the acknowledgment of our own positionality and perspective: an issue brought into focus by the Bagenal sisters as they recall their recently deceased father and his legacy. Mary hagiographically celebrates how he brought “order and prosperity” to County Down and Armagh, his civilising impact evidenced by his establishment of orchards; the import of damson, plum, pear and apple trees from Kent; the draining of surrounding bogland, before ploughing and planting the land in contrast with native neglect: “savage people who refuse to cultivate the land God gave us.” In response, Mabel asks if this benign interpretation would be shared by those Cistercian monks dispossessed and driven out by their father as an “agent of civilization when he routed them out of their monastery and took it over as our home”.
The sisters’ polarised perspectives over their father lie at the heart of Friel’s play in terms of how history should be recorded and remembered: a dilemma applicable not only to the Elizabethan era (how should we remember Sir Francis Drake in Ireland?) but to our own more recent history. Indeed, this philosophical quandary is responsible for the political quagmire we have in the North whereby partisan cultures of remembrance and commemoration help reinforce division. In post-conflict Northern Ireland, we share a history for which we still have no shared memory, and here lies the central paradox underpinning the whole cat’s cradle of truth and memory, history and myth, fact and fiction that Friel’s play deftly unspools. Consider for a moment, the controversy that irrupted when a children’s playground in Newry (not far from the home of the Bagenal sisters) was named the ‘Raymond McCreesh Park’ in honour of the IRA hunger-striker. Local residents and representatives regarded McCreesh, who died after 61 days in the 1981 Maze/Long Kesh hunger-strike, as a republican hero; for them, naming the park in his honour was fitting tribute to his sacrifice. Equally true, however, is the fact that McCreesh and his fellow volunteers were arrested in 1976 in possession of weapons used in the notorious Kingsmill massacre that took place five months previous, barely four miles away. One of the worst atrocities of the Troubles, ten Protestant civilians were taken from a van and shot dead whilst their single Catholic colleague was spared. So, how should we remember? How should this history be told?
I don’t know the answer to these practical and philosophical questions, but I do know that theatre mobilises these issues brilliantly in performance. Onstage, truths and histories are never absolute; they are always unstable, subject to multiple frames and the mutable forces of interpretation of artists and audiences. Friel plays with all these elements in Making History as he does in Freedom of the City, which opens with the killing of three civilians by British soldiers in the chaotic aftermath of a political demonstration. All three victims subsequently have their deaths distorted in the accounts of various authorities: a legal enquiry, the broadcast media, a balladeer, a priest and a sociologist; all of whom press into the service the facts so that they fit their own political perspectives to form wildly varying narratives. Each account selectively manipulates and misrepresents the violent deaths of the innocent victims that we ourselves have witnessed, as we sit in the dark, staring at the light like silent voyeurs. However, Friel compels us to leave our comfortable passive positions; ultimately forcing us to arbitrate on the events that unfolded before us; to effectively act – with all that word connotes – as jurors who must make up their own minds as to the truth of what really happened. Collectively, all of these plays: Translations, Freedom of the City and Making History, are salutary reminders that history isn’t over yet…
Which once more brings me back to Rathlin’s benighted history and a remarkable account of the 1575 massacre by Oxford’s leading historian, James Anthony Froude, whose influential studies staunchly supported the violent excesses of even Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland, as the rigid Tory historian hailed “military despotism” as the necessary “remedy” for dealing with Irish resistance. But even Froude baulked at Essex’s actions on Rathlin; regarding it as a “bloody stain” that has long laid “buried”, before suggesting that what is repressed will eventually return, in a manner reminiscent of his near-namesake, Freud: “when the history of England’s dealings with Ireland settles at last into its final shape, that hunt among the caves at Rathlin will not be forgotten.” Alas, it seems that Methodist College Belfast hasn’t received this memo yet…
Froude, for all his faults, wrote beautifully and so it seems only appropriate to invoke his luminous image of history being a lantern suspended at the stern of a ship; its light revealing the waves in its wake. With that evocative image in mind, I would like to return once more to Rathlin; to a windless day on a smooth sea in October 1917, when a very real ship, an armoured cruiser, was returning to port having escorted a convoy across the Atlantic from America, when it was attacked by a German U-boat. The explosion from the first torpedo killed eighteen sailors, leaving the stricken ship listing heavily to starboard, mortally wounded. Disabled and badly damaged, the crippled cruiser limped into Church Bay, seeking anchorage in this sheltered stretch of Rathlin’s coast, with one survivor, from the deck of the ship, observing how “the gorse bloomed yellow on the hills” as they approached the harbour. Any hopes, however, of salvaging the vessel were soon scuppered as the 14,000-ton vessel – the former flagship of the Home Fleet – swiftly capsized in the bay. Local islanders assisted with the evacuation of the ship, hosting the survivors in their own homes, before the crew could be reassigned to Glasgow, Dublin, Buncrana and Derry.
Although there is official information or account that acknowledges this strange coincidence, with its uncanny convergence of the past and present, one can only imagine the wry comments and wisecracks that must have been made by the islanders of Rathlin as they helped and hosted the survivors of the hapless ship that sunk so close to their homes: the HMS Drake; named after the “gross man” whose name remains infamy on the isle.
Dr Mark Phelan is Senior Lecturer in Drama, Queen’s University Belfast. His teaching and research are primarily concerned with the role theatre and performance ‘plays’ in ongoing processes of conflict transformation in the North of Ireland.
He is a Trustee of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast.
NOTE: To my shame, I have no Irish, so my sincere thanks to Dr Gearóid Trimble for his expert insight and assistance with the orthographic accuracy of Rathlin’s placenames.
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.
