Edward Martyn

• Born: January 31, 1859
• Birthplace: Masonbrook, Ireland
• Died: December 5, 1923
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

Other Literary Forms

Edward Martyn is known exclusively as a playwright, although he also published a novel, Morgante the Lesser (1890), under the pseudonym Sirius. The novel’s combination of wit and scatology makes Martyn a remote relation of Jonathan Swift and François Rabelais, and as a shaggy-dog story, it owes a debt to Laurence Sterne. In addition, the novel belongs to a rich Gaelic and Anglo-Irish tradition of satires on learning. Its interest is confined exclusively to literary history, however, thanks to its turgid style and flaccid pace. Perhaps its most surprising aspect is its authorship. Nothing in the rigorous Ibsenite realism of his major plays or in the ascetic idealism of his private life would lead one to suspect that Martyn ever perpetrated a work that might well be ascribed to Alfred Jarry.

Achievements

Edward Martyn has a permanent, if minor, place in the history of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Because this cultural phenomenon undertook no less than to change, or indeed to review, the mind of a nation, a minor contribution to it should not necessarily be considered negligible. William Butler Yeats, in one of his summaries of Martyn’s achievements, dismissively mentions Martyn merely as one of Lady Augusta Gregory’s neighbors who “paid for our first performances” (those, that is, of the Irish Literary Theatre, the company that in 1904 became the Abbey Theatre). In fact, Martyn was a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre , and his play The Heather Field was the company’s second production. Moreover, Martyn brought to the company a set of theatrical ideals, heavily influenced by the drama of Henrik Ibsen, which offered an alternative to Yeats’s concept of “peasant drama.” This alternative remained underdeveloped, and partly as a result, Martyn’s playwriting career stagnated. In The Heather Field, however, Martyn demonstrated, intriguingly but embryonically, how his approach could have spoken in realistic terms about contemporary Irish idealism.

Far from being merely the nascent Irish theater’s well-disposed financier, Martyn was as committed to the renaissance as was any of its other initiators. Despite more lasting contributions to other spheres of Irish culture and the fact that he was, by temperament, better equipped to be a critic than an artist, Martyn’s position in the anterooms of fame is assured. He gave significant impetus to one of the twentieth century’s most distinctive theatrical undertakings.

Biography

Edward Martyn was born to an illustrious family of Irish Catholic aristocrats at Masonbrook, near Loughrea, County Galway, on January 31, 1859. His father died the following year, and Edward and his brother were reared in the Martyn family home, Tulira Castle (which he subsequently inherited).

When Martyn was eight years old, the family moved to Dublin, where Martyn briefly attended Belvedere College. A further move, to London, led to his enrollment, in 1870, at Beaumont College, Windsor (like Belvedere, a prominent Jesuit school). Completing his secondary education in 1876, Martyn—in an unusual move for a Catholic—entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1877. There he had an undistinguished career and left, without taking his degree, in 1879, though not before falling under the influence of the aesthetic philosophy of Walter Pater.

The following year found Martyn in Paris, in the company of his cousin and subsequent nemesis, the Irish novelist George Moore. Paris gave him access to such contemporary artistic movements as Symbolism and Impressionism (Martyn had an important collection of Impressionist paintings, notably of works by Edgar Degas). Extensive travel in Europe put him in touch with other important cultural developments, such as Wagnerism and Hellenism. The latter proved an important enthusiasm on Martyn’s return to Tulira Castle, and he divided his time between Tulira and London artistic circles, in which he cultivated the acquaintance of, among others, Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley.

In 1885, however, Martyn underwent a spiritual crisis of some severity, resulting in the replacement of virtually all the modern tastes that he had formed with a more pious and ascetic regimen. The most important survivors of this reevaluation were the drama of Ibsen and the music of Giovanni Palestrina. It is tempting, with this crisis in mind, to view Martyn’s contribution to the Irish Literary Theatre as, in part, rehabilitative. The crisis certainly contributed to the scathing attitude, and essentially inchoate argument, of his pseudonymous novel, Morgante the Lesser.

The Irish Literary Theatre was founded by Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory in 1899, and in its early days, Martyn, as well as Yeats, was its principal playwright. By 1902, however, Martyn had resigned from the venture, partly because of artistic differences with Yeats but partly also because of the arrival of George Moore. (Moore was later to subject Martyn to merciless satire in his three-volume memoir of those years, Hail and Farewell, 1911-1914—treatment to which Martyn eventually responded in kind in The Dream Physician.)

The matter at issue between Moore and Martyn was the latter’s play The Tale of a Town. In response to Yeats’s criticism of it, Moore revised the piece, which was then staged under the title The Bending of the Bough (pr. 1900). After resigning from the Irish Literary Theatre, Martyn continued his playwriting career. He directed a large share of his energies to other areas of Irish culture, however, particularly to music.

In 1902, after protracted negotiations, the Palestrina Choir was established at the Pro-Cathedral, Dublin. The choir was exclusively Martyn’s idea, and at the time of its inauguration he referred to it as “the chief interest of my life.” This interest reflected an unorthodox approach to bringing art to the people. A unique expression of the Irish Literary Renaissance’s ethos, the choir was financed almost exclusively by Martyn. As a result of this venture’s success, Martyn devoted further time and money to beautifying provincial churches with tapestries, stained glass, and similar ornamentation.

After his break with Yeats and Moore, Martyn also developed a strong interest in, and commitment to, the Gaelic League, an organization devoted to the restoration of the Irish language. Martyn believed Irish to be second only to Greek among the world’s languages. As a practical expression of his commitment, he set about rehabilitating traditional Irish music. He was instrumental in organizing an annual outlet for amateur performers called Feis Ceoil (music festival). At one of these, a tenor named James Joyce performed. Perhaps the most substantial expression of Martyn’s involvement with the non-Yeatsian renaissance was his presidency of Sinn Féin (the renaissance’s political manifestation) from 1904 to 1908.

In 1906, Martyn helped establish the Theatre of Ireland . Its principles were identical to those of the more successful Irish Theatre, which Martyn founded in 1914, assisted by Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, both of whom were executed for their parts in the Easter Rising of 1916. These principles echo Martyn’s lifelong admiration of drama, which was intellectual in theme and which availed itself of contemporary European dramaturgical models. Despite numerous vicissitudes, the Irish Theatre managed to remain open until 1920.

Martyn’s activities on behalf of the Irish Theatre marked the end of his public life. He died in Dublin on December 5, 1923, a lonely and neglected figure. He was unmarried.

Analysis

Inspired by the most impressive contemporary models and fortified by the principles derived from them, Edward Martyn had perhaps too clear an intellectual formula for his work and an insufficiently coherent aesthetic approach. Adherence to his formula made the work repetitive, two-dimensional, and lacking in vitality. Like so many of his protagonists, Martyn failed to live up to the promise of his ideals. Yet those ideals, particularly in their eschewal of sentimentality, and the works that attempt to articulate them provide an important perspective from which to view the theatrical accomplishments of his contemporaries.

The Heather Field

Martyn made his name as a dramatist with The Heather Field, and his subsequent works consist of a series of not very startling variations on that play. Without being autobiographical, The Heather Field draws on important features of Martyn’s life.

The play is set in the wild country of the author’s native western Ireland. The action takes place in the context of the Land War, as the struggle between peasants and landlords over conditions of tenure was called. The play is not absolutely contemporaneous with the events it relates; the Land War was at its height from the late 1870’s to the mid-1880’s and had simmered down considerably by the turn of the century. Nevertheless, the play’s references to events still fresh in the minds of an Irish audience emphasize Martyn’s rejection of prehistoric material as the vehicle of his vision and have something in common with the belief of James Joyce (another Ibsenite) that art may be won from the life of one’s own unpromising times. This belief is implicit in all of Martyn’s plays. Regardless of whether one accepts that the handling of the belief conforms to the tenets of realism, the plays’ intellectual bases are firmly grounded in realism.

In addition, the protagonist of The Heather Field, Carden Tyrrell, is a landlord, as Martyn himself was. He is given a surname whose Irish associations are as notable in their own right as is the name Martyn. Tyrrell is provided with one of Martyn’s own formative experiences, that of hearing exalted song from the choir of Cologne Cathedral. Tyrrell is also an “improving” landlord—that is, one who takes an interest in his property (which a great number of Irish landlords did not). In fact, the play contains an unexamined paradox concerning Tyrrell’s social commitments: He makes every effort to reclaim land and enlarge his holdings, yet he is notably unsympathetic to the causes of the Land War. This paradox is subsumed under the more divisive and irreconcilable aspects of Tyrrell’s case. Martyn is less interested in his protagonist’s social situation than in his psychological condition. It should be noted, however, that The Heather Field is an important step forward in the representation of typical Irish types not as figures of fun but as serious embodiments of predicaments experienced by the majority of conscious humanity. By remaining faithful to conditions with which he was intimately familiar, Martyn helped to enlarge the stock of Irish dramatic characters. By dignifying stereotypes, he offered the basis for a new dramatic perspective on Irish life.

The plot of The Heather Field is somewhat spare. Tyrrell conceives an overweening ambition to reclaim the wild, infertile areas of his demesne. To this end, he has risked his fortune draining the heather field of the title. This project is, ostensibly, a success: Productive grass has evidently supplanted pretty, barren heathland. As a result, Tyrrell is determined to go forward and put the whole of his property in financial jeopardy in order to expand his reclamation scheme. Barry Ussher, a friend and neighbor, attempts to dissuade Tyrrell from his rash ambition but to no avail. Moreover, Tyrrell’s wife, Grace (like most of Martyn’s protagonists, Tyrrell is unsuitably married, a fate which the author himself assiduously avoided), is aggressively opposed to the scheme, so much so that she attempts to have her husband certified as insane. Only the timely intervention of Barry Ussher thwarts such a development, Tyrrell being so engrossed in his dream of fertility that he cannot perceive Grace’s tactics or defend himself against the two doctors summoned to the house to carry out Grace’s design. As events reveal, however, official certification of insanity becomes a formality. In the third act, spring has come round again and with it the triumph of heather over grass. The result is that Tyrrell, refusing to accept that nature has declined to answer his needs, loses his mind. He cannot tell past from present, or anything else about himself and the real world that has frustrated his dreams.

Establishing a theme that was to recur in Martyn’s work, The Heather Field is a critique of idealism—or perhaps of idealism in a solipsistic formulation. Tyrrell does not recognize that his ambition is flawed on practical grounds. He cannot accept the fact that the world will not necessarily accommodate the needs he foists on it. His indifference to society, both in the polite sense of the word and in the historical sense, throws him back on his own psychic resources, which wilt under the pressure. Tyrrell’s isolation is subjectively crucial and objectively crippling. The belief that the reclamation scheme is the signature of his integrity leads inevitably to his disintegration. As practical dramatic evidence of his situation, Tyrrell seems to exist in the play in order to contest what everyone else says to him rather than adjust to it. The only relaxation of this intransigent manner occurs in exchanges with his young son, Kit, who is being reared as a child of nature. These exchanges ironically portray the child as father to the man: the child’s genuine, naïve wonder of the same state of mind—a pursuit of the natural that requires the face of nature to be redrawn.

One of the rewards of The Heather Field, therefore, is in identifying the protagonist’s problems from an intellectual standpoint. In terms of its theatrical dynamics, however, the play is less satisfactory. The dialogue is written in prose of a rather leaden variety, and the scenes are conceived as set pieces in an argument rather than as occasions in a man’s life. These drawbacks are nevertheless redeemed by the strength of Tyrrell’s commitment to his ideal: It does, after all, cost him everything. The audience’s involvement with his fate is sustained by the persuasiveness with which the ideal is conveyed. It is clear that for Tyrrell, the heather field and the dream of rehabilitation that it duplicitously facilitates offer the possibility of beauty, renewal, and completeness. It is an alternative to history, both personal (his marriage) and social (the Land War). Tyrrell claims to hear voices when he is out in the field, the voices of a German choir, the definitive experience of beauty that he received in his formative years, and it is these voices he welcomes when nature fails and madness overwhelms him.

The author’s unsparing revelation of his protagonist’s irreconcilable tensions gives the play its dramatic strength and also lends to it a cultural significance of which Martyn may have been only incidentally aware. The play is a fascinating and idiosyncratic example of a distinctively Irish genre, consisting of works, in a variety of literary forms, which deal with the decline of the Big House, the generic term for the homes of the landed gentry.

As noted, Martyn’s other plays repeat the themes of The Heather Field, but whereas The Heather Field contains a degree of tacit sympathy for Tyrrell (if only because all the other characters are narrower in spirit than he is), the critique of idealism in later plays is rather more bitter. In fact, what causes subsequent works to have destructive endings is not idealism of the characters as such, but its frustration.

Grangecolman

Grangecolmanis a case in point. The action is set in the Colman family home, a large old house outside Dublin, and the plot is concerned with the hauntings of an irrecoverable past. This theme is conveyed with a symbolic explicitness that borders on the obtuse and that, at the same time, leaves the intellectual burden of the play vague and generalized.

The household consists of old Michael Colman, the last of his line, his daughter Catherine, and her ne’er-do-well husband, Lucius Devlin. Michael is an antiquarian, a pursuit which in the Irish literature of the generation before Martyn’s epitomized impotent reclusiveness. Catherine, who, with her husband, espouses the contemporary feminism, is a doctor, but her career has been blighted because of Lucius’s irresponsible financial speculations. To assist him with his research, Michael hires young Clare Farquhar. Her grace and energy have a restorative effect on the old man’s morale. This development, in turn, arouses Catherine’s hostility.

Early in the play, the notion of the house’s decline is introduced. Incursions, by thieves from the outside and ghosts from within, are feared. Miss Farquhar, handling a revolver, promises to deal with intruders of whatever kind. The audience soon learns, however, of the depth of Catherine’s jealousy of Clare, whose vitality and resolve are at odds with Catherine’s self-abnegating temperament. Catherine’s hostility erupts in her peremptory dismissal of Clare from her duties.

Ignorant of this development, Michael proposes marriage to Clare, a step that Catherine naturally opposes, using the occasion to voice the ideals of feminism and independence, which, for all of her enthusiasm for them, have evidently driven her into a dead end. Leaving the scene in an agitated state, she later returns, impersonating the family ghost. Clare takes the revolver and kills her.

Undoubtedly the plot’s gothic machinery gets in the way of the play’s intellectual brooding. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the ideological impasse to which Catherine’s idealism has led. Once again, the world resists the pressure placed by the mind on it, with catastrophic results for the mind’s proprietor. The contrived nature of the scenario diminishes the play’s surface plausibility, while at the same time drawing attention to the situation’s latent incoherence. In the dialogue, Martyn shows himself to be as tone-deaf as ever to the rhythms of human speech, but the consistency of the play’s gloom and pessimism in a sense works to sanction its shortcomings. It seems remarkable that a committed Catholic such as Martyn continued to write plays that implicitly deny the possibility of faith. The depiction of conditions that are apparently beyond redemption—a prominent feature throughout Martyn’s work—is given its most funereal presentation in Grangecolman, a play that, in the hands of a more adept playwright, would have fully realized itself as a plainsong dirge for the past, present, and future and for cultural recuperation, social commitment, and personal vanity.

The Dream Physician

In his last play, The Dream Physician, Martyn resorted to an uncharacteristic mode that perhaps he should have cultivated—namely, satire. (The Tale of a Town is the other major dramatic example of Martyn’s satiric powers.) The basic framework of the plot is no more than a pretext for the author to have the last word about the role of Yeats and George Moore (particularly the latter) in the Irish Literary Renaissance. The surgery that exposes these luminaries’ pretensions in act 4 is wholly out of keeping with the play’s stilted pace, but the results are hilarious. Moore is presented as the fraudulent, malicious, self-seeking George Augustus Moon, and Yeats is caricatured as Beau Brummell, whose self-appointed destiny is to save the soul of his people with the aid of a banjo.

The plot concerns Shane Lester, who has betrayed his Anglo-Irish origins by becoming president of, and later member of Parliament for, an Irish nationalist group. His wife, Audrey, a social butterfly, cannot forgive Shane for this shift in allegiance, and she and her husband have a violent fight, during the course of which Audrey believes that she has killed him. Nothing will expunge this fantasy—the dream of the title. Audrey is confined to bed in a semicatatonic state, despite Shane’s numerous entreating visits. A nurse, Sister Farnan, is engaged to care for Audrey, and it is she who suggests that the patient will snap out of her dream if confronted with a reality to which she cannot possibly assent. This reality is provided by the antics of Moon and company, and exposure to it has the desired therapeutic effect: The play ends with Audrey and Shane reconciled. Moon’s posturing makes him the dream physician; the imbalance resulting from his pretensions makes it impossible to take seriously what he represents. By virtue of experiencing that impossibility, Audrey is restored to a reality that she can take seriously, her husband’s.

Clearly, however, The Dream Physician is itself imbalanced, formally and thematically. Martyn was unable to work out a unified relationship between the more general theme of Shane’s idealism, embodied in his nationalist leanings, and the more local and personal bouts of character assassination, which have little or nothing to do directly with Shane. This failure places the play in danger of being a unique example of a hopelessly implausible genre, the revenge farce. After the sobriety of most of its predecessors, however, it is pleasant to encounter a spirited Martyn. The caricatures of Moore and Yeats show all the signs of being an insider’s work. Less successful are the cartoons of Lady Gregory (Sister Farnan) and James Joyce. Joyce was allegedly the model for Otho, Audrey’s insufferable brother, who finally comes to life when he denounces Moon because his beloved, Moon’s grandniece, “a woman of genius” who signs her poetic effusions “La Mayonaise” (Mayo was George Moore’s native county), proves to be nonexistent.

Bibliography

Courtney, Marie Therese. Edward Martyn and the Irish Theatre. New York: Vantage Press, 1956. A detailed portrait of Martyn in the context of Irish theatrical history. Courtney examines his involvement in the establishment of a national theater movement from both a biographical and an artistic point of view and assesses the eventual effect of that involvement on Martyn. All Martyn’s dramatic works are thoroughly evaluated.

Feeney, William J., ed. Edward Martyn’s Irish Theatre. Vol. 2 in George Spelvin’s Theatre Book. Newark, Del.: Proscenium Press, 1980. These essays examine the Irish Theatre established by Martyn and discuss plays of its writers, including Martyn’s Romulus and Remus and Thomas MacDonagh’s Pagans.

Gwynn, Denis. Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival. 1930. Reprint. New York: Lemma, 1974. An early attempt to describe Martyn’s role in the Irish Literary Renaissance. Much of the focus is on Martyn’s contributions to the development of Irish drama. The study, however, also contains information on his other cultural commitments, with the result that an overall sense of Martyn’s cultural context emerges.

Hogan, Robert, and James Kilroy. The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899-1901. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975. Contains a considerable amount of detailed information regarding Martyn’s involvement in the events that led to the eventual formation of Ireland’s national theater. Includes accounts of the production and reception of Martyn’s plays. The volume also provides extensive scholarly support for the study of the formative period of modern Irish theater.

Setterquist, Jan. Edward Martyn. Vol. 2 in Ibsen and the Beginnings of Anglo-Irish Drama. 1951-1960. Reprint. New York: Gordian Press, 1974. The impact of Henrik Ibsen’s revolution in the social and critical role of the drama on the fledgling Irish theater is examined. Martyn’s complicated attitude toward Ibsen’s example is central to this study’s argument, and Martyn’s plays are also seen in the context of the Ibsenite dimension of the contemporary Irish drama.