St. John Ervine

• Born: December 28, 1883
• Birthplace: Belfast, Northern Ireland
• Died: January 24, 1971
• Place of death: London, England

Other Literary Forms

St. John Ervine was the author of several novels that were highly regarded in their day. His novels, such as Mrs. Martin’s Man (1914) and The Foolish Lovers (1920), display the same strengths as the best of his plays—realism and clarity of design and structure. Ervine also wrote abrasive and controversial drama criticism for several newspapers. Finally, he was the author of several opinionated biographies of literary and public figures, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.

Achievements

St. John Ervine holds an honorable place in the Irish Literary Renaissance; as such, he is aligned with William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and the Abbey Theatre. His greatest achievements are his early Irish plays, two of which, Jane Clegg and John Ferguson, have long been recognized as minor classics. After a brief time as manager of the Abbey Theatre followed by wartime military service, Ervine settled in England and was chosen as a member of the Irish Academy. He served as professor of dramatic literature for the Royal Society of Literature from 1933 through 1936. His critical theory supports his practice in his early plays: Dramatic value resides in the author’s attempt to present real people dealing with believable human situations. Though he turned from playwriting to novels, criticism, and political and biographical essays, Ervine is best remembered as a spokesperson for and practitioner of dramatic realism. His influence on a later generation of Irish playwrights, while indirect, may be seen in the continuation of the realistic tradition. Ervine serves as an exemplar of honest, realistic, economically plotted, straightforward playwriting.

Biography

St. John Greer Ervine was born in Belfast in Northern Ireland on December 28, 1883. He did not take a university degree but was writing plays by age twenty-four. In 1911, he married Leonora Mary Davis and became associated with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He served for a brief time as manager of the Abbey Theatre and, in that capacity, produced his best play, John Ferguson. His British sympathies caused an estrangement between him and the theater players, and on May 29, 1916, the actors declared their unwillingness to work under Ervine’s direction. The resultant break with the Abbey Theatre, combined with the escalation of World War I, led Ervine to turn away from Ireland and exclusively Irish subject matter. His service in a regiment of the British Household Battalion and, later, with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers ended in 1918, when he was severely wounded and suffered the loss of a leg.

After the war, Ervine settled in London. His first London success was in 1929, when his play, The First Mrs. Fraser, enjoyed an extended run. That success was repeated the next year in New York. His career expanded to include novels, essays on political and ethical subjects, drama criticism, and biographies. He was drama critic for The Sunday Observer of London, and in 1929, he was guest drama critic for The World in New York. His criticism was controversial, which is usually attributed to Ervine’s plainspoken, even harsh criticism of American plays. His reputation for acerbity rests additionally on his style. Abandoning his polished, sophisticated prose, he wrote in an approximation of a “Broadway” dialect; this caused at least as much outrage as his astringent critical judgments. Indeed, this choice of dialect seems to have been a mistake. As dialect, it is not accurate, and its use seems patronizing, even if that was not Ervine’s intent.

After his return to London, Ervine served for three years as professor of dramatic literature for the Royal Society of Literature. His later plays, written after he left Ireland, are less serious than his early work. These later plays, written for a British audience, are sophisticated comedies of manners that rely on wit and topicality for their very considerable effect. Ervine’s biographical subjects included men of letters such as Shaw and Wilde; William Booth, founder and General of the Salvation Army; and Lord Craigavon, the first prime minister of Ulster. His biographies reflect his literary, ethical, and political interests. They are partisan rather than objective, polemical rather than scholarly.

With the production of William John Mawhinney in 1940, Ervine renewed his association with the Abbey Theatre; one of his next plays, Friends and Relations, was produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1941. These were the last of Ervine’s works to premiere at the Abbey Theatre, however, and in 1957, Ervine completed his theatrical career with the production of Esperanza. Ervine died in 1971, at the age of eighty-seven.

Analysis

St. John Ervine’s early plays are good plays, strong and believable in their economy and in characters who force the viewer to accept plots that have become clichés. The deliberate simplicity of construction, the unity of tone and theme, the absolutely vital characters, make Ervine an important playwright. His plays are not complex or difficult to understand; their value lies precisely in their accessibility and believability.

Ervine’s early Irish plays are his finest, displaying the strengths characteristic of his best work in all genres. Mixed Marriage, Jane Clegg, John Ferguson, and The Ship are uniformly serious in plot and theme, realistic in subject matter, and economical in structure. Ervine’s virtues as a playwright are traditional ones; each play has a single, unified plot and an unambiguous, uncomplicated theme. Each play displays great economy of construction and a modest level of aspiration, and within this deliberately simple, unassuming framework, it succeeds because of certain very real strengths of structure and characterization.

Economy

In his drama criticism, Ervine’s touchstone is economy. In every important way, the early plays illustrate that Ervine believed in and followed his own theory. Economy is not a negative value of limiting, cutting, and leaving out; it is, rather, a positive principle. Good theater, to Ervine, is that which exhibits restraint and simplicity in cast size, subject matter, plot line, dialogue, and characterization.

The casts, for example, are uniformly small. John Ferguson has the largest cast; there are eleven characters. Jane Clegg has seven; The Ship, eight; and Mixed Marriage, six. There are simply no minor characters whose dramatic function may be described as merely decorative. Every character is important and necessary to the development of the action of the play.

The action of each play is also dictated in part by Ervine’s rule of economy. On a superficial level, his plays are devoid of luxuries such as tableau scenes, offstage voices, and unnecessary dramatic business. There is a minimum of exposition; for the most part, each play consists only of those events that are seen by the audience. The exposition in John Ferguson, for example, is limited to the information that the Fergusons are going to lose their farm unless they manage to pay the mortgage; the audience learns of the successive trials of John Ferguson’s faith in a just God as Ferguson himself experiences them. The exposition in Jane Clegg is limited to the information that Henry Clegg has been unfaithful to his wife in the past. This immediacy of action is present in all the early plays. Nothing has happened; everything happens onstage during the course of the play.

The plays are all limited to a single plot, which is usually a familiar one and which is uniformly serious. Each of the long plays consists of a single story whose content is that of everyday life. Jane Clegg deals with the failure of a marriage, John Ferguson with the loss of a farm and the destruction of a family through violence. The Ship is a study of the lack of communication between a strong-willed father and his son. Mixed Marriage deals with the public forces that destroy the private romance of a Protestant boy and a Catholic girl. The stories are familiar ones, and Ervine does not alter his material so that it appears to be anything other than what it essentially is—newspaper realism, known territory to everyone. At the same time, there is always a single sustained idea that informs and illuminates the play.

The dialogue of Ervine’s plays also exhibits his characteristic economy. The language of all the early plays is simple and easily understood and has as its function the furthering of the plot and the revelation of character. Dialogue, Ervine believed, should sound artlessly natural but should actually be an artful construct. None of Ervine’s characters chatters aimlessly; no one repeats himself or leaves a sentence or thought unfinished. Ervine eliminates those parts of ordinary talk that would produce conversation rather than dialogue. Even when his characters are supposed to be merely making conversation, there is no excess. Each seemingly meaningless sentence is working to establish character. Again, the principle of economy is used as a positive force to shape an element of Ervine’s plays.

The characters in Ervine’s plays are, like his plots, familiar and instantly recognizable types, yet they are also extremely believable and vital. The character of Jane Clegg is strong and able to bear suffering; Rainey of Mixed Marriage and John Thurlow of The Ship are egotists. In each character, there is a single, prevailing element of personality, and each character becomes real and believable within his own “humor.” The characters are drawn with little internal complexity; they are not cowardly and brave, but rather cowardly or brave. Like his dialogue, Ervine’s characters appear to be natural but are in fact artful constructs.

Plot

One can appreciate Ervine’s art most fully by examining the elements of plot and character in his early plays. In general, the plot is the weakest element of each play. All the plays have plots associated with melodrama. John Ferguson is the story of a family whose farm is lost to the evil landlord who forecloses, rapes the daughter, and is murdered by the son. Jane Clegg is the story of the strong, long-suffering wife who holds her family together while her husband loses her money, embezzles company funds, and finally runs away with a younger woman. Mixed Marriage deals with young lovers surrounded by the chaos of a strike that rapidly becomes a religious war; ultimately, the lovers are destroyed by the religious bigotry of the Protestant father. The Ship is the story of a strong-willed father who builds a ship that “God couldn’t sink” and forces his son to sail on her maiden voyage. The son, who has refused to enter the family business, dies when the ship is sunk after colliding with an iceberg. The plots are both melodramatic and highly conventional. There are no surprising turns, no innovative twists in the action.

An important technique that Ervine used to control the response of the audience is one that is closely related to satire. Within the structure of the plot, there is always an explicit norm with which the audience can identify. The plots of the early plays make, in some way, an attack on stupidity, and there is usually a character who explicitly represents the sane, moral position of playwright and audience. Jane Clegg, John Ferguson, Old Mrs. Thurlow, and Mrs. Rainey are articulate spokespersons for the standards of good sense and morality. One recognizes the standard they offer and judges the other characters and the plot development by this explicit norm.

The plots of the four plays hinge on dramatic irony of the simplest, most basic sort. John Ferguson’s family is destroyed because his brother forgot to mail the money that would have saved the farm; Jack Thurlow dies because his father asks him to sail with the ship just this once. John Rainey loses his children because his religious prejudice is stronger than his desire to unite the Protestant and Catholic strikers.

Although the plots of these plays are simple and melodramatic, this is not a serious weakness in Ervine’s art. Perhaps a playwright cannot create great drama from this material, but he can create great theater. Ervine asks his audience to respond in a rather uncomplicated, unsophisticated manner; he manages to get an audience, conditioned to dismiss plots of this nature as slight and hackneyed, to believe implicitly in his stories. The audience understands the familiar, unambiguous plots and themes, applauds the hero and hisses the villain, but not with the self-conscious condescension that one would bring to minstrel-show melodrama. The audience reacts in an unsophisticated way to the plays, but it reacts sincerely.

Characters

In large part, this response can be attributed to the vitality of Ervine’s characters. His best characters are universal types: The audience recognizes the villainous landlord or the foolish, irritating mother-in-law with a shock of pleasure. Each character is also, within his or her type, absolutely individual.

Ervine is particularly good with certain types of characters. His villains are all lifelike and effective. They are of two types: The first is the unpleasant little vermin, such as Jimmy Caesar in John Ferguson; Henry Clegg and the racing tout, Munce, in Jane Clegg; and Captain Cornelius in The Ship. The second type is the monster of evil, such as Witherow in John Ferguson. The villain Witherow has no redeeming qualities; he is unalterably evil. He is a brilliantly drawn one-dimensional character; the audience hates him and is appeased by his death.

Jimmy Caesar and the other little villains are villainous because they are weak and mean-spirited. They are more satisfactory characters than is Witherow because they are more complex, and the audience is able to despise them as well as hate them. They are all incapable of anything as large and important as a foreclosure or a rape. Their villainies are secret and unsavory; they are all cowards. Captain Cornelius is willing to accept money from John Thurlow in return for ruining Jack’s farm; Munce is quite willing to ruin lives to get his money from Henry Clegg; Henry himself leaves his wife, children, and mother penniless for another woman and cannot understand why no one is terribly sorry to see him go. Jimmy Caesar, the most vividly drawn of the weak villains, is the unsavory suitor of Hannah Ferguson; he grovels at Witherow’s feet, nauseates Hannah when he tries to kiss her, goes home to bed when he is supposedly avenging her honor, eats a hearty breakfast while he confesses his cowardice, and offers to marry Hannah even though her rape has made her “unworthy” of him.

In Mrs. Rainey, Old Mrs. Thurlow, and John Ferguson, Ervine creates strong, sympathetic moral characters. John Ferguson, for example, is uniformly good without being unrealistic. He is devout, gentle, and forgiving, yet, unlike many virtuous characters, absolutely convincing. His moments of doubt are canceled by his monumental Christian goodness and faith. He is a truly decent man who keeps his faith in a just God even as he mourns his ruined son and daughter. Like John Ferguson, Mrs. Rainey in Mixed Marriage is consistently good, tender and protective toward her sons, sensible and tolerant toward Michael O’Hara, their Catholic friend, and gentle with Nora, Hugh’s girlfriend. Most important, she manages to love her husband even though she has no respect for him and disapproves of his tenaciously held prejudices. Mrs. Rainey, Old Mrs. Thurlow, and John Ferguson are all voices of sanity in situations that have suddenly gone insane. Mrs. Rainey pleads for religious tolerance in the middle of a religious war; John Ferguson tries to love and protect the man who has taken his farm and raped his daughter; Old Mrs. Thurlow of The Ship tries to reconcile her son and grandson, and when Jack dies in his father’s place, she comforts and encourages John Thurlow to continue to live with unchanged goals even though she believes him to be wrong.

Bibliography

Bell, Sam Hanna. The Theatre in Ulster. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972. Bell considers Ervine as an Ulster dramatist and compares his work with that of other playwrights of his generation from Northern Ireland. Discusses briefly productions of Ervine’s works and mentions their main social and cultural features, though the brevity of this study’s overview limits discussion.

Cronin, John. Introduction to Selected Plays of St. John Ervine. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988. Contains Mixed Marriage, Jane Clegg, John Ferguson, Boyd’s Shop, and Friends and Relations. The introduction provides biographical information and establishes a cultural context for Ervine’s work. Includes extracts from Ervine’s dramaturgical writings and a bibliography of Ervine’s dramatic and numerous other works.

Hogan, Robert, and James Kilroy. The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History. 6 vols. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975-1992. A multivolume history of Irish drama, including dramatists such as Ervine.

Hunt, Hugh. The Abbey: Ireland’s National Theatre, 1904-1978. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. This historical narrative deals in passing with Ervine’s plays. Provides a more detailed description of the playwright’s sojourn as manager of the Abbey Theatre and assesses its effects. Includes a full list of productions at the Abbey from the theater’s foundation, facilitating a preliminary chronology of Ervine’s dramatic career there.

Maxwell, D. E. S. A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama, 1891-1980. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Locates Ervine’s drama in the context of developments in realism in the Irish theater and provides a critical analysis of his most noteworthy plays. Draws attention to the Ulster origins of much of Ervine’s dramatic material. Contains a bibliography and a chronology of Irish theater.