Staging a Stereotype in Gaelic Garb: Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque , 1613

Abstract

John Speed, Map ofIreland (1610), bottom left corner. Reproduced by kind permission ofThe Folge,r Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. 86 Margaret Rose Jaster Staging a Stereotype in Gaelic Garb: Ben Jonson's Irish Masque, 1613 By the time Ben Jonson staged his Irish Masque at Court in December, 1613, his bumbling loquacious Irishmen offered the aristocratic English audience a familiar image. Shakespeare, Dekker, Field, Beaumont, and Fletcher, as well as Jonson himself, had catered to the English audience's sense oftheir superiority by staging the Irish as stupid and uncouth.1 In a letter to Dudley Carlton dated January 5, 1614, John Chamberlain notes the inappropriateness ofburlesquing the Irish when relations between the countries were so delicate: "... theyre device (which was a mimical imitation of the Irish) was not so pleasing to many, which thincke yt no time (as the case stands) to exasperate that nation by making yt ridiculous."2 Jonson's use ofGaelic apparel in his Irish Masque is informed by a long and conflicted history ofattitudes toward the Irish national costume. A score of English writers had for centuries inveighed against the Gaelic Irish habit, the most recent entry being Sir John Davies's A Discovery ofthe True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued (1612). The English perspective was predictable: they fetishize the Irish as being as savage as their attire. Early modern English colonialist discourse consistently depends upon the figure ofthat "Wild Irishman" attired in his mantle, sporting a long forelock or "glybb;' to help define this near neighbor as Other. In chronicle, commentary, and the codes that forbade it, the mantle is condemned for the freedom it allows the wearer, and that might have been enough to effect its unsavory reputation with the English. In addition, because the Irish revered their mantle, it became a sartorial signifier for Irishness, and any attendant negative images in the minds of the early modern English public. The belief that apparel significantly affects the wearer's perception of himself is clear in the political tract A View ofthe Present State ofIreland (1596), wherein Edmund Spenser conceives the English conquest as a simple change of clothes: Apparel! is Comonlye made according to theire Condicions and theire Condidons are often times gouerned by theire garmentes ... when Cirus had ouer1 . I wish to thank Nicholas Canny, Jane Donawerth, Andrew Gurr, and William Mahar for their helpful comments on various versions of this essay. 2. C. H. Hereford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., The Works ofBen Jonson, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 10: 541. NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW /JRJS EIREANNACH NUA, 2:4 (GEIMHREADH/WJNTER, 1998), 86--98 Staging a Stereotype in Gaelic Garb: Ben Jonson's Irish Masque, 1613 come the Lidians that weare a warlike nacion and devised to bringe them to a more peaceful liffe he Chaunged theire Apparrell ... And in steade of theire shorte warlike Coate clothed them in Ionge garmentes ... in shorte space theire mindes weare so mollified and abated that they forgate theire former firesnes ... wheareby it appeareth that theare is not a litle in the garment to the fashioninge of the minde and Condicions ....3 The English will replace the traditional Gaelic garments of the rebellious Irish with civil English fashions and thereby"mollify and abate" their warlike nature. Spenser was not to realize his fantasy, but his wishful thinking reveals the belief in the conrnection between clothes and consciousness. The ideas ofSpenser and other prose writers circulated primarily among the bureaucratic elite, but staging the stereotype disseminated it among the English public. Those strategic stagings made use of the mantle and glybb in political discourse so as to contribute to the derogatory image of"Irishness;' an image which depended on the construction of a damning stereotype. Further, staged images of Irishness occurred in two historical contexts: first, the long history of English revulsion and Irish reverence for these indicators ofGaelicism; second, the particular performance circumstances of each early modern staging. English playwrights deployed generic considerations to further the image of the stereotyped barbaric Irishman for the English public. Ben Jonson's Irish Masque at Court (1613), for example, attends to the role of the mantle in the creation of King James"s...

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