Brendan Behan's Lament for Gaelic Ireland: The Quare Fellow
2002; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nhr.2002.0017
ISSN1534-5815
Autores Tópico(s)Scottish History and National Identity
ResumoCriticism of Brendan Behan's masterpiece The Quare Fellow has generally viewed it as an anti-capital punishment drama and often tended to neglect its critique of lingering imperial remnants in postindependence Ireland. 1 While on one level The Quare Fellow (1956)is a ribald polemic against capital punishment, on a more subversive level, it is also an insider's exposé of the collision between residual British imperialism and the vanishing world of Gaelic Ireland in an urban Dublin jail. This drama was influenced by earlier executions Behan witnessed, especially that of Bernard Kirwan in 1943, and largely written to the moment; Ireland and Britain were then embroiled in an acrimonious public debate over capital punishment. Alan Simpson has pointed out the contemporary relevance of the play's critique of this practice: "The impact of The Quare Fellow in 1954 was greatly sharpened by the fact that judicial hanging was still practised by the governments of both Britain and Ireland." 2 But Behan's drama has a twofold aim: in addition to being a protest against capital punishment, it is also a skillfully rendered lament for the rapidly disappearing Gaeltacht areas of Ireland—particularly the Blasket Islands (Na Blascaodaí) off the Dingle Peninsula—which Behan had come to know and love. This reading of Behan's drama also delineates a tentative outline of an anticolonial Irish drama and assesses the place of The Quare Fellow in this dramatic tradition.
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