Cathleen ni Houlihan’s resonant central image of the nation-as-woman/queen has become one that later generations of Irish dramatists respond to and critique. This exploration will suggest that this image inspired little respect in the... more
Cathleen ni Houlihan’s resonant central image of the nation-as-woman/queen has become one that later generations of Irish dramatists respond to and critique. This exploration will suggest that this image inspired little respect in the drama produced by the conflicted post-war Irish in England in particular, who felt allegiance neither to the motherland they were obliged to leave nor to their adopted mother, Britannia. This outlook will be linked to the punk movement of 1970s Britain, which was arguably one in which the offspring of post-war Irish immigrants played a pivotal role and whose anarchist message was disseminated worldwide by a defaced image of Queen Elizabeth II. Such analysis will be used to contextualize the work of British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who has been repeatedly labelled a “punk playwright,” and to suggest that the reduced “queen” of his most iconoclastic play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), negates both the female sovereign of the land of his birth and Yeats and Gregory’s seemingly failed Irish alternative.
