Cathal Goan is former Director-General of RTÉ and Chairman of Druid Theatre Company. He was born in Belfast and received his University education in University College Dublin where he qualified in Celtic Studies in 1975. He spent two years post-graduate in the Department of Irish Folklore UCD before beginning work as a research officer with The Placenames’ Commission of the Irish Ordnance Survey. He subsequently joined RTÉ as an archivist before becoming first a radio and then a television producer in Current Affairs. In 1990 he became Editor of all RTÉ’s television output in the Irish language and in 1994 he was chosen as the first Chief Executive of the new Irish language television service which was about to be established in Galway. Teilifís na Gaeilge – TG4 – began broadcasting in October 1996 and has gained widespread recognition for the inventiveness and variety of its commissioned programming. In 2000 he returned to Dublin as Director of Television Programming at RTÉ. In 2003 he was appointed Director General (CEO) of RTÉ, a position that he held until January 2011. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Ulster in 2006 in recognition of his services to the Irish language and to broadcasting in Ireland. He was appointed Adjunct Professor in the School of Irish Language, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics in UCD in 2011. He has a life-long interest in Irish music with particular reference to the Irish language song tradition.
]]>Cathal Goan is former Director-General of RTÉ and Chairman of Druid Theatre Company. He was born in Belfast and received his University education in University College Dublin where he qualified in Celtic Studies in 1975. He spent two years post-graduate in the Department of Irish Folklore UCD before beginning work as a research officer with The Placenames’ Commission of the Irish Ordnance Survey. He subsequently joined RTÉ as an archivist before becoming first a radio and then a television producer in Current Affairs. In 1990 he became Editor of all RTÉ’s television output in the Irish language and in 1994 he was chosen as the first Chief Executive of the new Irish language television service which was about to be established in Galway. Teilifís na Gaeilge – TG4 – began broadcasting in October 1996 and has gained widespread recognition for the inventiveness and variety of its commissioned programming. In 2000 he returned to Dublin as Director of Television Programming at RTÉ. In 2003 he was appointed Director General (CEO) of RTÉ, a position that he held until January 2011. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Ulster in 2006 in recognition of his services to the Irish language and to broadcasting in Ireland. He was appointed Adjunct Professor in the School of Irish Language, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore and Linguistics in UCD in 2011. He has a life-long interest in Irish music with particular reference to the Irish language song tradition.
Aindreas Ó GALLCHOIR
Declan Kiberd is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at University of Notre Dame. He was for many years Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD and wrote a chapter on Thomas MacDonagh in The UCD Aesthetic. Among his books are Synge and the Irish Language, Idir Dhá Chultúr, Inventing Ireland, Irish Classics and Ulysses and Us. Handbook of the Irish Revival 1891-1922, co-edited with PJ Mathews, has just been published by Abbey Theatre Press (June 2015). He is a former Director of the Yeats International Summer School and of the Abbey Theatre.
]]>Declan Kiberd is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at University of Notre Dame. He was for many years Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD and wrote a chapter on Thomas MacDonagh in The UCD Aesthetic. Among his books are Synge and the Irish Language, Idir Dhá Chultúr, Inventing Ireland, Irish Classics and Ulysses and Us. Handbook of the Irish Revival 1891-1922, co-edited with PJ Mathews, has just been published by Abbey Theatre Press (June 2015). He is a former Director of the Yeats International Summer School and of the Abbey Theatre.
BRUMMELL. And just when the oracle was about to culminate in some stupendous utterance—Oh! To have it ignorantly and barbarously shattered like this—!
MOON. Look here, Brummell, I can’t stand you any longer. I’ll be quite frank with you. I admit you are a very good musician, or at least you were once. But I assure you that you are at the same time the most egregious intellectual fop the world has ever seen.
BRUMMELL. What do you mean, Moon? You know you cannot compose unless the female typist is at hand to flatter and call everything you produce a masterpiece.
MOON (very excited). Not at all—you take it for granted that I am dried up like yourself.
BRUMMELL (scornfully). Magnificent insolence—! But you can only think like a child. [They shake their fists in each other’s face. MISS WHELAN drops the fragments and flies out by the door at back calling for the Police. She is quickly followed by GERRARD, and by SISTER FARNAN, who bears off Audrey. MOON seizes the washhand-stand and defends himself, as BRUMMELL raises the banjo in order to strike him.]
Interestingly, Brummell-Yeats’s comment on Moon-Moore’s typist has been rendered in one of the caricatures by Grace Gifford, published in the frontispiece of the last issue of the Irish Review (September/November 1914).
Sources:
Feeney, William. ‘Irish Theatre, The (1914-1920)’. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan. London: Aldwych Press, 1996. Print.
Martyn, Edward. The Dream Physician. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1915. Print.
Nolan, Jerry. ‘Edward Martyn’s Struggle for an Irish National Theater, 1899-1920’. New Hibernia Review. Vol. 7, N. 2, Samhradh/Summer 2003. Print.
]]>The inaugural play of the Irish Theatre, Edward Martyn's The Dream Physician (1914).
The Dream Physician was the inaugural play of the Irish Theatre a new dramatic venture set up in 1914 by Martyn, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett and ‘conceived as an alternative to the commercial playhouses and to the peasant drama of the Abbey Theatre’ (Feeney). The Dream physician was first performed in the Little Theatre in O’Connell Street from 2nd to 7th of November 1914. The play is a parody against three Irish Literary Theatre directors George Moore (‘George Augustus Moon, an old journalist’), W.B. Yeats (‘Beau Brummel, a musician’), and Augusta Gregory (‘Sister Fernan, a hospital nurse). According to Jerry Nolan, Martyn’s satire in the play was aimed a number of fixations of the literary theatre directors: ‘the cult of egotistical interpretation of events, the posturings of self appointed geniuses, poetic incantations, occult practices, Fiona McLeod-William Sharpe style of Celtic verse, and Lady Gregory Kiltartanese.’ An example of this parodic mode is the scuffle at the end of Act IV, when an improvised séance with an eighteenth century wash-hand stand and with Sister Farnan as a medium degenerates when the wash-hand stand is broken by Moon:
BRUMMELL. And just when the oracle was about to culminate in some stupendous utterance—Oh! To have it ignorantly and barbarously shattered like this—!
MOON. Look here, Brummell, I can’t stand you any longer. I’ll be quite frank with you. I admit you are a very good musician, or at least you were once. But I assure you that you are at the same time the most egregious intellectual fop the world has ever seen.
BRUMMELL. What do you mean, Moon? You know you cannot compose unless the female typist is at hand to flatter and call everything you produce a masterpiece.
MOON (very excited). Not at all—you take it for granted that I am dried up like yourself.
BRUMMELL (scornfully). Magnificent insolence—! But you can only think like a child. [They shake their fists in each other’s face. MISS WHELAN drops the fragments and flies out by the door at back calling for the Police. She is quickly followed by GERRARD, and by SISTER FARNAN, who bears off Audrey. MOON seizes the washhand-stand and defends himself, as BRUMMELL raises the banjo in order to strike him.]
Interestingly, Brummell-Yeats’s comment on Moon-Moore’s typist has been rendered in one of the caricatures by Grace Gifford, published in the frontispiece of the last issue of the Irish Review (September/November 1914).
Sources:
Feeney, William. ‘Irish Theatre, The (1914-1920)’. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan. London: Aldwych Press, 1996. Print.
Martyn, Edward. The Dream Physician. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1915. Print.
Nolan, Jerry. ‘Edward Martyn’s Struggle for an Irish National Theater, 1899-1920’. New Hibernia Review. Vol. 7, N. 2, Samhradh/Summer 2003. Print.
Frontispiece of the Irish Review with plate by George Russell (March 1913)
Irish Review
Richard Joseph Long’s painting ‘Reflections’ reproduced in the July 1912 issue of the Irish Review was exhibited at the Oireachtas Art Exhibition in 1911 along with another of his works 'Edge of the Wood'. According to Ann Stewart, Long also exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1914 with a portrait of Samuel Anderson, Esq., L.D.S., Galway and ‘Reflections’. At this time his address was 1 High Street Galway.
Sources
Luddy, Maria. “(Johanna) Hanna Sheehy- Skeffington". Dictionary of Irish Biography. (Ed.) James McGuire, James Quinn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Web.
Sheehy-Skeffington, Hanna. ‘The Women’s Movement—Ireland’. Irish Review. July 1912. Print.
Stewart, Ann. Irish Art Societies and Sketching Clubs: Index of Exhibitors, 1870-1980. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Print.
*** I would like to thank Dr Roísín Kennedy in the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy for providing information and sources on Richard Long***
]]>Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington's article about the Women's Movement in Ireland appeared in the Irish Review in July 1912, on the eve of her imprisonment following a demonstration of the Irish Women’s Franchise League in June 1912. As Maria Luddy documents, during the demonstrations some windows in government buildings were broken and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and other women were imprisoned for a month and from prison they lobbied for political status (DIB). The article in the Review documents the work of Irish women’s movements, and attacks stereotypical view of women as passive and subservient to men and advocates for women’s active participation in the public sphere.
Richard Joseph Long’s painting ‘Reflections’ reproduced in the July 1912 issue of the Irish Review was exhibited at the Oireachtas Art Exhibition in 1911 along with another of his works 'Edge of the Wood'. According to Ann Stewart, Long also exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1914 with a portrait of Samuel Anderson, Esq., L.D.S., Galway and ‘Reflections’. At this time his address was 1 High Street Galway.
Sources
Luddy, Maria. “(Johanna) Hanna Sheehy- Skeffington". Dictionary of Irish Biography. (Ed.) James McGuire, James Quinn. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Web.
Sheehy-Skeffington, Hanna. ‘The Women’s Movement—Ireland’. Irish Review. July 1912. Print.
Stewart, Ann. Irish Art Societies and Sketching Clubs: Index of Exhibitors, 1870-1980. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Print.
*** I would like to thank Dr Roísín Kennedy in the UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy for providing information and sources on Richard Long***
Harry Clarke’s plate in the Irish Review
Plate for the July 1913 issue of the Irish Review by Harry Clarke. The plate “The Silver Apples of the Moon, the Golden Apples of the Sun” illustrates W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”
Dr. Kurt Bullock is an associate professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Irish literature and critical theory and directs senior and master's-level theses. His area of scholarship is the work of Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett; he most recently published two chapters on MacDonagh and the Irish Review last summer: "From Revival to Revolution: Thomas MacDonagh and the Irish Review" in Ireland and the New Journalism (eds. Karen Steele, Michael de Nie); and "Literary Provocateur: Revival, Revolt, and the Censure of the Irish Review" in The Home Rule Crisis, 1912-1914 (ed. Gabriel Doherty).
See also Bibliography for further information on his scholarship
Dr. Kurt Bullock is an associate professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Irish literature and critical theory and directs senior and master's-level theses. His area of scholarship is the work of Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett; he most recently published two chapters on MacDonagh and the Irish Review last summer: "From Revival to Revolution: Thomas MacDonagh and the Irish Review" in Ireland and the New Journalism (eds. Karen Steele, Michael de Nie); and "Literary Provocateur: Revival, Revolt, and the Censure of the Irish Review" in The Home Rule Crisis, 1912-1914 (ed. Gabriel Doherty).
See also Bibliography for further information on his scholarship
Frontispiece of the Irish Review with plate by Nathaniel Hone (January 1912)
Frontispiece of the January 1912 Irish Review with a plate by Nathaniel Hone entitled “The Wave.” Nathaniel Hone II (1831-1917) was connected with other important painters and art dealers on the Irish scene such as John B. Yeats, Sarah Purser and Hugh Lane.