And what rough beast: The political geography of physical impairment in twentieth-century Irish drama and theatre

As part of the on-going interrogation of the various myths of territory which hold sway in Ireland today, this study will analyze physically-impaired characters as they appear in twentieth century Irish drama and theatre, delineating the strategies by which these "rough beast" figures (a designation suggested by W.B. Yeats's 1919 poem "The Second Coming") perform resistance and stage alternatives to the delimited social space carved out by the island's dominant discourse on issues of historical, cultural, and political identity.; It is the argument of this study that the "rough beast" emerged in Irish dramatic literature as an outgrowth of the Gaelic Revival's attempt to formulate and promulgate a distinctly Irish cultural and political identity. Initially, a literary metaphor for the island's experience of social fragmentation brought about by its encounter with British imperialism, these physically-impaired characters, beginning with Danny Mann in Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn (1860), granted materiality to ideas and identities excluded from the island's polarized socio-political narrative by its dominant institutions and ideologies. In the twentieth century, the staging of the beast in plays like J.M. Synge's The Well of the Saints (1905), Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Silver Tassie (1928), Yeats's The Death of Cuchulain (1939) and, in the last decades of the century, Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (1990), Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney (1994) and Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan (1996), constituted a resistant performance, demanding space within the social matrices on both sides of the border for new understandings of Irishness. These understandings were produced, through the performed metaphor of the rough beast, as compelling, nuanced argument against the political, social, and cultural divisions imposed on the island by generations of colonialism and its aftermath, against the wholesale assimilation of Irish notions of self into a homogenized European or global social reality and for a functional, inclusive metaphorical structure of the island's geography consistent with existing geographies, yet distinctly Irish in its construction of social relationships, meanings, and institutions.