Casimir Markievicz’s Irish Drama: anti-imperialism and the avant-garde in Dublin

The article traces the lives of the daughter of the landed class in the West of Ireland, Constance Gore Booth and a son of a Polish aristocratic family, Casimir Markievicz. She, the future Irish revolutionary, he a painter and playwright, through marriage and fruitful collaboration, managed for a period of time to mingle politics and art as well as the political and historical experiences of the Polish and Irish nations. The article traces these mutual interconnections, by looking at a number of plays and paintings by Casimir Markievicz and by analyzing the political and social engagements carried out by Constance Gore Booth. In case of Markievicz and his plays the article interestingly shows how he was able to connect the contemporary, Ibsenian, form of what was then called “New Drama” with coded messages concerning the current politics and his own political views. What is more, Arrington carefully traces the elements of the thesis play and melodrama in his works, reconstructing from authentic reviews of the period the impact they made both on the reviewers and political commentators of the day. Additionally, the article not only paints an interesting picture of the literary Dublin of the inter-war period but also shows how Markievicz’s writing refers to and borrows from the canonical works of such playwrights as Synge, Yeats and Lady Gregory