Josephine Lee

The history of English and Irish relations in the last two centuries might well present itself as a straightforward picture of England as oppressor, “rewriting” Ireland into cultural submission not only through political control, but also through the imposition of English as the language of high culture. But the project of reading cultural imperialism through language is much more complicated than it at first appears. In particular, the nineteenth-century movement to find a “lingua communis” for Ireland reveals that such an ideal is less of a God-given state of natural language than an unstable construct to which people give value and meaning. Nowhere is this problem more clear than in the history of the Abbey Theatre's search for a stage language. Linguistic issues that arise for the early Abbey also come back to haunt a much later play, Brian Friel's Translations. Both reveal the lasting ideological and political controversies surrounding language, and complicate our sense of how we can read the legacy of imperialism as inscribed within theatrical discourse.

Irish politicians and intellectuals have long recognized the importance of language; that, as Thomas Davis declared decades earlier, “A nation should guard its language more than its territories” (Nation, 1 April 1843; quoted in Brown 58). In the late nineteenth century, the speaking of Gaelic took on even greater symbolic weight, as various groups lobbied for the de-Anglicization of Irish culture. Douglas Hyde's inaugural address as President of the National Literary Society in November of 1892 urged “The Necessity of De-Anglicising the Irish People, ” and looked forward to the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893. Inghinidhe na hÉireann adopted as its goals “to discourage the reading and circulation of low English literature, the singing of English songs, the attending of vulgar English entertainments at the theatre and music-hall, and to combat in

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