Betsy Gray (q.d.)

The play is set in 1798 around the traditional Ulster heroine of the Rebellion and Henry Munro, the Presbyterian rebel. Munro is arrested as a murderer when Jane Nugent, who jealously loves him, accidentally shoots Squire Gray, Betsy’s father. Shiela’s plan to get Munro out of prison is to make the sargeant drunk and empty the bullets [balls] out of the soldier’s muskets the night before the execution. The entire plot is noticeably skewed towards the women. Johnston acts the villain in attempting to exchange Munro for Betsy’s hand and fortune, and then threatens to take her by force (‘I mean to have you here and now’). When Betsy convinces General Nugent to release Munro as innocent on his warrant, Johnston tears it up, and plans to shoot the prisoner ‘while trying to escape’. Betsy joins in at the Battle of Ballynahinch.
 The plot-element that concerns the shooting of Squire Gray by Lady Nugent and the framing of Munro for his murder are mangled in subsequent scenes - notably where Betsy accuses Lady Nugent with Johnston of ‘murdering her father in cold blood’ - notwithstanding the nature of the episode and the fact that Squire Gray and the other two were on the same side. Betsy’s extinction, in the ‘business’ at the close is equally extraordinary. After a pistol duel with Lady Nugent ending in the latter’s death, she steps between Munro and and Col. Bruce, and is pierced by both their swords. Sheila now says to her, ‘Betsy darlin’! Are you much hurt?’

Cheryl Herr, ed. For the Land they Loved: Irish Political Melodramas (Syracuse UP 1991), gives biography information [as supra]; Notes: In 1915, Bourke’s For the Land She Loved was produced at the Abbey; the Castle remonstrated with St. John Ervine fror ‘permitting this piece of sedition to be performed’ (acc. de Burca); Ervine responded by barring de Burca from the Abbey. Bourke’s film, Ireland A Nation was shown at the Rotunda on 8 Jan. 1917, he himself playing the part of Michael Dwyer, and banned on the following day. (p.15.) , Herr calls the tradition of interpreting 1798 which eludes the trap of guilt, self-hatred and ‘cosmically mandated dependency’ an ‘alternative take’ for which ‘the primary vehicles [...] were ‘plays created by Whitbread and Bourke.’ [21] Their work asserts a typological patterning in order to resuscitate the triumphs of the highly varied political undertakings often too indiscriminately gathered together as the 1798 Rising. [...] they emphasised the coexistence of success and defeat. [...; they] entered into the dialogue that produced the Easter Rising. Further, This positioning of class relations has a great deal more to do with melodramatic tradition than with Ireland in the era of the Queen’s theatre, and by Bourke’s time such sentimentalising of the class system was highly anachronistic. [...] Bourke portrays a world in which the stakes are just as high but in which the principal players are neither aristocrats nor barrister-statesmen but folk more humbly placed in the social hierarchy. (p.53-54). In focusing on local instead of national heroes, Bourke achieved a shift in emphasis from the truly or metaphorically aristocratic to the position normally occupied by the stage Irishman ... the ordinary worker-as-hero found his or her place on the Queen’s stage’ (p.55.) [See further under Quotations - as infra.]