The Irish theatre from 1601 to c. 1900 was bound intimately to the society that produced
it. Started by the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, it grew and changed with it, reflecting its
preoccupations and prejudices, while seeking at the same time to forge its conscience
and urge it towards personal and communal transformation.
The theatre mirrors the development of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy; the overall image
it presents shifts as the Ascendancy mutates, its power deteriorates, and the view of the
playwrights becomes more questioning, indifferent or hostile.
From exalting Ascendancy virtues (Shirley and Orrery), it moves to express the views
of the 'bourgeois Ascendancy' (Shadwell and Philips), then to a more questioning and
radical view, (Knowles and O'Keeffe). Nationalist dramatists take a more critical stance,
and the portrayal of the Ascendancy becomes more equivocal and marginal in
Boucicault and Whitbread, until eliminated almost completely in the theatre of P.J.
Bourke.
This was a political theatre, involved continuously in self-definition, personal and
societal. The plays and their authors were modelling moral and social formation for a
divided country. The 'generous lovers' of Philips, the 'mercenary' bourgeoises of
Shadwell, the rowdy mongrel gentlemen of Macklin and Sheridan, O'Keeffe's subtle
jacobinism, Boucicault's imagined aristocracy, and the aspirational exemplars of the
Nationalist Melodrama, all display the urge to transformation that is endemic in the
early Irish theatre.
Within this larger pattern, certain themes recur: the appropriation of the English
language by the Irish and the colonization of Irish culture by the English, the
importance of women as the agents of change, the displacement of a dominant class by
an aggressive lower class, and the change by the Anglo-Irish in their perception of
ancient Ireland, from a savage wilderness infested with barbarians, to a cultured
civilization set in a Romantic landscape.