gives to the pressures that build up in the individual psyche and in society in
general.

Shakespeare's phrase, one which has haunted me for years, gave me the subtitle
for this book. As I wrote I found myself continually returning to a relationship be-
tween the forms theatre creates to shape and give vent to personal and collective
pressures, and the form or forms of representation and government that would
accommodate the different inheritances and inbuilt divisions of Irish history and
society. In theatre, as in all the arts, artistic form strives to shape that which resists,
most strenuously, being brought to book; yet without this attempt to harness the
pressures that drive society, those voices that are most crucial to our well-being,
the ones that speak of tragedy and joy, cannot be heard. This is Patrick Mason's
'work': it involves order and emotion, form and pressure. Form arises from
(amongst other things) judgement and morality; pressure builds out of emotion
and pity and fear. The body of the time is embodied in the physical presence of the
actors on the stage. In the twentieth century Ireland discovered its dramatic iden-
tity: the Fays, Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, F. J. McCormick, Barry Fitzgerald, Siobhán
McKenna, are, all of them, physical realizations of an Ireland present to itself,
ready to absorb the mystery and awe of its reality, for the first time shown to itself
by itself. In a seminar once at Coleraine Frank McGuinness described the extra-
ordinary success of eighteenth-century Irish playwrights and actors in London as
the Irish finding in Drury Lane and elsewhere an opportunity for saying 'we're
here; we exist'.

In the twentieth century the Abbey was one of the crucial spaces in which the
Irish said to themselves, and to each other: 'we're here; we exist. This is how we
talk; this is what we do. This is how terrible we are. This is also our gentleness, our
hurt. These are our memories, our shame, our delight.' The world listened, be-
cause what was being voiced and embodied in Dublin was powerful; it sprang
from the inner life, the emotions, the collective pressures, of a people.

I have often thought that I must have some kind of self-punishing instinct in the
tasks I set myself as a writer, as a researcher. Or maybe there is some obscure im-
pulse of self-justification. My first book was a study, not of a nineteenth-century
novelist or poet, but of Irish poetry in English of the nineteenth century; my
second was a history of verse translation from the Irish, not a study of an as-
pect, or a theme, or an author; my third was a study of the body of literature in
Ireland in the twentieth-century; and then there was the Oxford Companion to
Irish Literature ( 1996), which took all of Irish literature, in all its languages, as its
field.

And here is 'the Abbey'. I realize now that what I do, for better or for worse, is
groundwork. This is the title of my last novel ( Groundwork, 1997), itself an at-
tempt to uncover the genealogies of Irish feeling. I try to open ground.

So much work remains to be done on the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre:
there need to be histories of the actors, the performance methods, the personali-
ties and motivations of the directors, of design, of language, and of the reception

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