This book is born of a love of comedy and performance. It takes as its focus Irish political melodrama as mass entertainment through the late nineteenth and into the first decades of the twentieth century in Ireland. The timeframe encapsulates some of the most turbulent years in recent Irish history, incorporating as it does the growing struggle to gain independence from British rule. The study dates are an attempt to capture those years, offering a broad historical guideline, and in that respect, they create the shape for the work. Tackling comedy when nationalist politics are in the same sentence can be difficult. Those discourses kept pulling away from the comic elements for some time, because the nationalist emblem is writ so large through the plays and reflected in the breadth and depth of cultural work about this period in Irish history. Those debates and controversies are well rehearsed elsewhere, and it would do little good to repeat what others have done far better than I. Necessarily, the work begins by tracing the historical, cultural and theatrical contexts of the period, within which the patriotic plays lived; those contexts inform and scaffold the remainder of the book. However, this book represents an exploration into the world of the patriotic melodramas in a related but different way. Moving on from those contextualised brushstrokes, the book makes enquiry of melodramatic worlds, its aesthetics as performance on both sides of the Irish Sea, with some discussion of the cultural anxieties surrounding its popularity on Irish stages. It does so in order to direct the enquiry towards alternative comic possibilities for the playtexts as popular theatre, while building on the substantive work of those who have already established the native dramas as significant in Irish political and cultural history.

Approaching the work from a comedy studies perspective was rewarding and challenging in the same measure. Extracting the comic structures from the plays was invigorating and laborious; the plays are built in soap opera repetition and for me, for some time at least, impossible to fully catch hold of. This is in part due to the familiarity of plot and motive, which can meld, but also because, in my view, the texts serve as a key; in other words, the plays only really come to life as performance. I acknowledge the bias while also suggesting that the idea is helped by the ways in which the plays came into the world; they are not born of a literary or ‘writerly’ tradition. Reading them, however much you like them, can make you forget, playing them makes you remember. And written as they were by actor-managers for performance, and as popular entertainments they had a ready market in Dublin, along the theatrical axis, and in the ‘smalls,’ which toured the rural towns of Ireland. So this study became about the comedy in the works and the working of that comedy through the totality of the performance text. It also became about practice and performance, and both approaches are detailed in this book. The academic study concentrates on in-depth, comic analysis of four of the patriotic plays, by the playwrights J.W. Whitbread and P.J. Bourke, as exemplary of their type, while also signalling to the works of those who had gone before, including Dion Boucicault and Hubert O’Grady. The selected plays evolved with the new decades of the twentieth century and the rising political and cultural tensions in Ireland. The analysis draws out the comic women while the practice-as-research enquiry offers new insights into their performance, with emphasis on staged comic women. Having separated out the approaches, it is important to note that they fold back in on each other; they are interwoven, with the discussion building from both, either in parallel or simultaneously. At the nexus of both approaches is a loose association of ideas, which I have called the comic everywoman. What became the comic everywoman started out with an arc of research that worked from broad understanding of the nature and function of the patriotic plays to the comedy at work in the plays to the comic women at work in the plays. Focussing in on the comic women deepened the direction of the study towards female comic agency on the popular stage: its freedoms and its constraints. The enquiry became about that mediated space for comic women, and what it might allow. The practice-as-research approach both on its own terms and speaking dialectically to the academic work goes some way to sketching how comic women had access to power within that inverted space of play. Both approaches also examine those inversions as the means to capture ways of playing that went beyond the text. The comic everywoman then is built out of the familiarity of stock, performing twice nightly for thousands of men and women and staging comic identity that has the means to play out versions of the performance text in relationship with, and to, her audience. This is the centre of the book and represents its beginning only. The formulation is proposed as a way for the comic women of distant texts and on popular stages in Ireland to be, as Cathy Leeney would say, seen and heard; for me, that is what is most exciting about it.