Abstract
This chapter places William Godwin’s historical tragedy Abbas, King of Persia (1801) in the context of the Act of Union (1801) of Britain and Ireland. The chapter argues that revisionist Irish historian John Curry’s critique of religious sectarianism was an important influence on Abbas, a play that offers allegorical resonances with the Ireland-Britain relationship. The chapter puts Abbas in dialogue with Mandeville (1817) and, by emphasizing Godwin’s knowledge of Irish history, challenges readings of Mandeville that have insisted on its privileging of individual psychic history over general history. By connecting Abbas with his earlier political journalism of the 1780s, Mandeville, and his History of the Commonwealth (1824–28), this chapter allows us to draw more robust lines of critical discussion through Godwin’s career as a whole.
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Notes
- 1.
The performance was immortalized in Charles Lamb’s hilarious account, ‘The Old Actors’ [1822] in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E.V. Lucas, 7 vols (London: Methuen & Co., 1903–5), II, pp. 291–94. For a full account of the composition and reception of Antonio , see The Plays of William Godwin, ed. David O’Shaughnessy (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), pp. xxiv–xxx.
- 2.
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols, ed. E. Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), I, p. 870.
- 3.
‘Invent Mirza’, 24 December 1800. The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy, and Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Digital Library, 2010). http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk [accessed 10 April 2018].
- 4.
Their comments and annotations are detailed in The Plays of William Godwin, ed. O’Shaughnessy.
- 5.
See both letters in The Letters of William Godwin Volume II: 1798–1805, ed. by Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 232–34.
- 6.
For a fuller account of the play’s composition and Godwin’s efforts to have it performed, see O’Shaughnessy, Plays of William Godwin, pp. xxx–xxxv.
- 7.
Julie Carlson, ‘Heavy Drama’ in Godwinian Moments: From the Enlightenment to Romanticism, ed. by Robert M. Maniquis and Victoria Myers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 217–38 (p. 224).
- 8.
Zaheer Kazmi, Polite Anarchy in International Relations Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 164–69.
- 9.
‘The Old Actors’, pp. 329–30.
- 10.
O’Shaughnessy, Plays of William Godwin, pp. 117–32.
- 11.
James Chandler, ‘A Discipline in Shifting Perspective: Why we need Irish Studies’, Field Day Review 2 (2006), 19–39 (p. 21).
- 12.
A search for ‘Ireland’ produces 651 hits in newspapers in December 1800 compared to 377 times in December 1799. Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Burney Newspapers Collection [accessed 12 April 2018].
- 13.
For a brief and recent account of the passing of the Act of Union, see Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 206–40. For a more detailed account, see Patrick M. Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics 1798–1801 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999) and The Irish Act of Union, 1800 Bicentennial Essays, ed. by Michael Brown, Patrick M. Geoghegan, and James Kelly (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003).
- 14.
Cited in Geoghegan, Irish Act of Union, p. 159.
- 15.
Geoghegan, Irish Act of Union, p. 163.
- 16.
Cited in Geoghegan, Irish Act of Union, p. 164.
- 17.
The Times, 10 February 1801.
- 18.
Martyn Powell, ‘Charles James Fox and Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies 33:130 (2002), 169–90. Dennis O’Bryen (1755–1832) was election agent, press manager, and advisor to Charles James Fox from the mid-1780s.
- 19.
John Binns (1772–1860) was a member of the London Corresponding Society and the United Englishmen which brought English radicalism and Irish revolutionaries into contact. He was charged with high treason for his association with Arthur O’Connor. John Fenwick (d. 1823) carried a copy of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice to Paris on its publication. He may have been a member of the Philomaths, an exclusive club to which Godwin belonged in the mid-1790s.
- 20.
Timothy Webb, ‘William Godwin’s Irish Expedition’ in Reinterpreting Robert Emmet, ed. by Anne Dolan, Patrick M. Geoghegan, and Darryl Jones (Dublin: UCD Press, 2007), pp. 105–37.
- 21.
On the epistolary tensions between Godwin and Shelley during Shelley’s trip to Dublin, see David O’Shaughnessy, ‘Godwin, Shelley, and the “free communication of intellect”’, Bodleian Library Record 25:1 (2012), 61–69. On Shelley in Ireland more generally, see Paul O’Brien, Shelley and Revolutionary Ireland (London: Bookmarks, 2002).
- 22.
Godwin first met Curran when he called to see him with John Fenwick on 3 October 1799. They became very close and they met over 450 times up to Curran’s death in 1817. Godwin wrote an obituary for his friend and described him as ‘almost the last of that brilliant phalanx, the contemporaries and fellow-labourers of Mr. Fox, in the cause of general liberty’. Morning Chronicle, 17 October 1817.
- 23.
William Godwin, Of Population (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), p. 387.
- 24.
See the introduction and appendices to Mandeville, ed. Tillotama Rajan (Ontario: Broadview, 2015) and Porscha Fermanis, ‘William Godwin’s “History of the Commonwealth” and the Psychology of Individual History’, Review of English Studies 61:252 (2010), 773–800 (pp. 794–98).
- 25.
See Charles O’Conor of Ballinagare, ed. by Luke Gibbons and Kieran O’Conor (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015).
- 26.
On John Curry see Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations: Antiquarian Debate and Cultural Politics in Ireland, c.1750–1800 (Cork and South Bend, Indiana: Cork University Press and University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), passim, esp. pp. 144–49.
- 27.
John Curry, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Rebellion, in the year 1641, 4th edn (London: Printed for J. Williams and T. Lewis, [1770?]), pp. v–vi.
- 28.
See David O’Shaughnessy, ‘“This is the dread hour, / That must decide the fate of England”: Godwin’s St Dunstan’, in Godwinian Moments, pp. 194–216.
- 29.
‘The conviviality of a feast may led to the depredations of a riot. While sympathy of opinion catches from man to man, especially in numerous meetings, and among persons whose passions have not been used to the curb of judgment, actions may be determined on, which solitary reflection would have rejected’. William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), III: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, p. 118.
- 30.
The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, 2nd edn ([Hamden, Conn.]: Archon Books and Yale University Press, 1969), p. 6.
- 31.
It was also perhaps a sly dig at Denham who was born in Dublin, although Gerard Langbaine was to assert reassuringly in his English Dramatic Poets (1691) that Denham was removed from Ireland to England ‘before the Foggy Air of that Climate, could influence, or any way adulterate his Mind’. Cited in Poetical Works of Denham, p. 3.
- 32.
One might, of course, speculate as to whether Coleridge had also been thinking of Ireland when he made his suggestion. On Coleridge and the Act of Union, see Stuart Andrews, ‘Coleridge, Gladstone, and the Irish Catholics’, The Coleridge Bulletin 32 (2008), 25–31.
- 33.
The Sophy (I.iii.150–56) in Poetical Works of Denham.
- 34.
Godwin did leave a synopsis of the remaining three acts so we have a fair sense of how his drama would have played out. Plays of William Godwin, ed. by O’Shaughnessy, Appendix 3.
- 35.
‘Irene is my Constance, possessing, like Constance in K. John, two scenes of intolerable distress’. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Abinger MSS, c.33 f.36v. Godwin’s manuscript notes on the composition of Abbas are available online here: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/1500-1900/abinger/abinger.html#abinger.A.5.1.
Johnson’s play, like Godwin’s, has had a mixed reception. Thanks to the efforts of Johnson’s old pupil, David Garrick, the play had nine performances in February 1749 and made the author £300. But biographer W. Jackson Bate writes that when reading the play’s stiff neo-classical language ‘the heart begins after a while to sink except in the most resolute Johnsonian, and sometimes even then’. W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 264.
- 36.
Garrick, in fact, convinced Johnson that Irene should be killed on stage but there was such an uproar and cries of ‘murder’ from the audience when this occurred, that she had to take herself offstage to be killed. This also happened to Godwin with the death of Elvira in Antonio when, as Lamb records, the audience were so outraged that they ‘would have torn the unfortunate author to pieces’. Lamb, ‘The Old Actors’, p. 293.
- 37.
David O’Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), p. 123.
- 38.
Emma Major, Madame Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 1.
- 39.
The Speeches of the Right Honourable William Pitt, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1817), III, p. 25.
- 40.
The distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘tendency’ was an important one for Godwin and had particular resonance for the theatre. See his theoretical reflection in ‘Of Choice in Reading’ in The Enquirer in William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols, gen. ed. Mark Philp (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1993), V: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit and O’Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre, pp. 17–30.
- 41.
Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government [1698], ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996).
- 42.
See the essays in The Enquirer, esp. ‘Of an Early Taste for Reading’, ‘Of the Study of the Classics’, ‘Of Knowledge’, ‘Of Reasoning and Contention’, and ‘Of Choice in Reading’.
- 43.
O’Shaughnessy, William Godwin and the Theatre, pp. 127–28.
- 44.
Oxford, Bodleian Library. MS Abinger, c. 33, ff. 31–42.
- 45.
One can see this develop clearly in political caricature in the work of Gillray and Rowlandson, for instance. See L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, rev. edn (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2007), p. 30.
- 46.
Joep Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), pp. 58–60.
- 47.
For the most illuminating discussion of revisionist eighteenth-century Irish historiography, see Clare O’Halloran, Golden Ages and Barbarous Nations. See also David Berman, ‘David Hume on the 1641 Irish Rebellion in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 65:258 (1976), 101–112.
- 48.
Kevin Whelan, '‘98 after ‘98: The Politics of Memory’ in The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1998), 133–175 (p. 138).
- 49.
William Godwin, Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1992), VI: Mandeville (ed. Pamela Clemit) p. 17. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition.
- 50.
There is also the tantalizing possibility that Godwin is echoing Edmund Burke’s infamous speech in December 1792 when he theatrically produced a dagger and flung it to the ground as he warned the House of Commons of these weapons being produced for use in Britain by French assassins.
- 51.
Mandeville, 16.
- 52.
Tillotama Rajan, ‘War, Trauma, and the Historical Novel in Godwin’s Mandeville’ in Godwinian Moments, 172–93 (p. 176).
- 53.
John Temple, The Irish Rebellion; or, An History of the Beginnings and first Progress of the Generall Rebellion raised within the Kingdom of Ireland… (London: Printed for R. White for Samuel Gellibrand, 1646), preface.
- 54.
The 1641 Depositions, held at Trinity College Dublin, have been digitized and are available here: http://1641.tcd.ie.
- 55.
John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), p. 131.
- 56.
Ibid. p. 139.
- 57.
In his History of the Commonwealth of England , Godwin synthesized both sides of the arguments by defending Irish civility to some degree but also underlining Irish Catholic superstition, submission to priests, and their experience of colonial violence to explain their ‘bloodshed and cruelty’. History of the Commonwealth of England, 4 vols (London: printed for Henry Colburn, 1824), I, p. 237.
- 58.
See his letter to Coleridge, 13 July 1801 in The Letters of William Godwin, 6 vols, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011–), II, p. 225.
- 59.
Writers such as Joseph Addison, Henry Brooke, Elizabeth Griffith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to give just a few examples.
- 60.
‘To the People of Ireland’ in William Godwin, Uncollected Writings (1785–1822), ed. Jack W. Marken and Burton R. Pollin (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), 57. Compare to Mandeville, p. 141. See Rajan’s (ed), Mandeville, pp. 35–36.
- 61.
A. E. Rodway, Godwin in the Age of Transition (London: G.G. Harrap, 1952), p. 39, cited in Carlson, ‘Heavy Drama’.
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O’Shaughnessy, D. (2021). Godwin, Ireland, and Historical Tragedy. In: O'Brien, E., Stark, H., Turner, B. (eds) New Approaches to William Godwin. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62912-0_2
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