Theatre of crisis

"This book describes the important role theatrical performance played in Ireland's cultural and political life between 1662 and 1692, when Ireland's subjects suffered the consequences of war, confiscation, and religious persecution. During this turbulent period, the threat of civil unrest and foreign invasion combined with memories of the 1641 uprising to create a state of heightened anxiety among the kingdom's subjects. Change, conflict, and persistent fear instigated an equally intense period of cultural production during which individuals representing Ireland's most important communities employed a wide variety of media to promote different agendas." "Theatre of Crisis provides more than just a close reading of specific plays in performance. It also offers an analysis of the dramatic literature staged in Dublin during the latter seventeenth century. It offers a cultural history that examines how soldiers, statesmen, and poets used specific media to define Ireland, its inhabitants, and their proper social order during a thirty-year period in which the kingdom and its government experienced rapid and dynamic change. The media available in seventeenth-century Ireland included Dublin's Theatre Royal at Smock Alley, the services of the Church of Ireland, the kingdom's viceregal pomp and civic ceremonies, and its official print industry." "Theatre of Crisis examines these communications systems as related technologies that Ireland's leaders mobilized in times of crisis. However, many unlicensed performances, religious practices, folk traditions, and unauthorized texts competed with the products of the kingdom's sanctioned media and developed alternatives to its dominant ideology. Each chapter details the practices that separated one medium from another and explains how their products dramatized the most important events that impacted Ireland's history during the seventeenth century."--Jacket.