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Life
| 1859: b., 30 Jan. Tulira Castle [vars. Tullyra [err. Tillyra]; also “Masonbrook” DIH], Ardrahan, Co Galway, last in the line of a Catholic landed family settled in Ireland since the twelfth century and exempted from penal laws by an act of Queen Anne; educ. at Beaumont College, Windsor, and Christ Church, Oxford; grad. 1879; adversely impressed by socialist rally of 20,000 dockers and suffragists in Trafalgar Square, London, 13 Nov. 1886; returns to Tulira, taking up up residence in tower of the castle; engages on writing Morgante the Lesser (1890), a satire on materialist culture based on Luigi Pulci’s medieval Morgante Maggiore and published under pseud. “Sirius” (1890); supports Gaelic League; encourages George Moore to return to Ireland with a telegram saying, ‘The sceptre of intelligence has passed from London to Dublin’ (as reported in Ave); an annual visitor to Bayreuth; |
| 1896: visited by W. B. Yeats at Tulira, and introduced him to Lady Gregory, a Galway neighbour, in 1896; sees producitoni of Ibsen’s Ghosts by Independent Theatre at Avenue Th. (London), Nov. 1896; co-fnds. Irish Literary Theatre with Yeats and Moore - acting as chief guarantor with a personal donation of £130 (and £30 from his mother), 1899; discovered the tenor John McCormack and subvented his musical training; meets Vincent O’Brien, music teacher at St. Mary’s Place CBS and director of the Clarendon St. Carmelite Church Boys’ Choir; objects to ‘uncatholic and heretical’ passages in The Countess Cathleen (1899); finances his own productions commencing with The Heather Field as the second production of the Irish Lit. Th. (9 May 1899), being an Ibsenite play in which Carden Tyrrell defends a field symbolic of Celtic purity and lost innocence; joins Gerald O’Donovan in decorating Loughrea Cathedral; supports church architecture reform and stain-glass movement; |
| 1900: produces Maeve, a ‘pyschological drama’ in two acts (Feb. 1900); his play The Tale of a Town (pub. 1902) revised by Moore as The Bending of the Bough (Feb. 1900), dealing with self-seeking borough place-hunters; offended by Moore’s and Yeats’s treatment of the play; publishes his correspondence with Lords Clonbrook and Ashbourne on his resignation from Deputy Lieutenantship & Peace Commissionership of Co. Galway (Daily Express, 24 March 1900); contribs. letters to the Leader lamenting the state of Irish church music and the use of women singers in church (Oct.-Dec. 1900); issues a Gaelic League pamphlet on Ireland’s Battle for Her Language (1900), criticising the Board of National Education; contribs. to Beltaine, No. 2, lamenting ‘efforts of certain persons and institutions whose aim seems to be to create in Ireland a sort of shabby England’ (February 1900); splits with Yeats and Lady Gregory over their commitment to ‘peasant plays’; |
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| 1901: writes a ‘plea’ for a National Theatre to Samhain (1901) though when asked for funds in 1901, he said, ‘Henceforth I will pay for nobody’s plays but my own’; his next, An Enchanted Sea, emulating The Lady from the Sea, rejected by the Irish Literary Theatre; endows Pro-Cathedral Palestrina Choir with £10,000 to improve liturgical music, Nov. 1902; fnd. Palestrina Choir, the Schola Cantorum of the Archdiocese, inviting Dom Gatard (of Solesmes) to train the singers, and engages Vincent O’Brien as director, 1903; chairs National Council of Cumann na nGaedhael protesting at the visit of Edward VII, 1903; asked by Maud Gonne to persuade Lord Mayor Timothy Harrington not greet the King; writes to Freeman’s Journal opposing the visit unless accompanied by Home Rule undertakings, and called for a hissing campaign throughout Ireland; appt. member of first board of Abbey Theatre, 1904; elected First President of Sinn Féin, 1904-08, chairing the National Council at the Rotunda, 28 Nov. 1905; |
| 1906: with George Russell, et al., co-fnds. Theatre of Ireland, 1906, a break-away from the National Theatre; co-fnds. Feis Cheoil; black-balled in the Kildare St. Club and successfully fights court action against its members; publishes ‘The Genius of the Villa Albani’, a sonnet invoking Winckelman as Master and prob. written in 1881 (The Leader, 29 April 1911); refused offer to stand in Galway election; issued Grangecolman (1912); fnds. Irish Theatre with Mary Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh, et al., at Hardwicke St., urging ‘the production of non-peasant drama by Irishmen, of plays in the Irish language, and of English translations of European masterworks for the theatre’ (‘Plea ...; &c.’); writes to the Freeman objecting to the appointment of Fr. Bewerunge to NUI Chair of Music, March 1914; issued The Dream Physician (1914); |
| 1916: Irish Theatre remains in operation despite death or imprisonment of some members after 1916 Rising; writes Regina Eyre (1919), an unpublished play in which he reversed the gender of the Hamlet characters and set the scene in Kerry; gravely affected by arthritis in later years; lives reclusively at Tulira Castle; d. 5 Dec., having stipulated that his body donated to Dublin teaching hospital and that he be buried in a pauper’s grave, permitting only the chanting to ‘Benedictus Dominus Deus Meus’ at his funeral; the wife of Baron Hemphill was his heir; his correspondence is held in the National Library of Ireland [MS 13068, &c.]; there is a portrait by Norman French McLachlan. DIB DIW DIH DIL2 OCEL JMC FDA OCIL |
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Works
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Bibliographical details
David B. Eaken & Michael Case, eds., George Moore & Edward Martyn: Selected Plays [Irish Dramatic Selections] (Washington: Catholic UP 1996), 362pp. [Moore: “The Strike at Arlingford”; “The Bending of the Bough”; “The Coming of Gabrielle”; “The Passing of the Essenes”; Martyn, “The Heather Field”; “Maeve”; The Tale of the Town”; An Enchanted Sea”].
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Criticism
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Commentary
George Moore (1) wrote an preface [introduction] for Martyn’s The Heather Field (1898), identifying the field with ‘the eternal aspiration of man to the ideal’ (pp.xxiv-xxv). In his preface to The Bending of the Bough (1900), he wrote of art’s flight from England, France, Germany and Russian, continuing: ‘when it leaves Norway [of Ibsen] it must find another small nation, one which has not yet achieved its destiny’ (p.xi). (See Ann Saddlemyer, ‘James Joyce and the Irish Dramatic Movement’, in James Joyce: An Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock, Gerrards Cross 1982, p.191.)
George Moore (2): Discussions of Martyn’s Catholic ‘soul’ form a central strand in the narrative in George Moore’s Hail and Farewell (1911-14) [where] he alleged that Martyn founded choirs not from his love of music but from his love of choir-boys.
George Moore (3): Martyn served as a model for characters in Moore’ s novels A Mere Accident and Mike Fletcher and was called ‘the sketch of a great man’ by him (Salve, p.211).
W. B. Yeats (1): Yeats’s visit to Tulira in 1896 is narrated in his Autobiographies, where he gives an account of the ‘vision of Diana’ (p.371), resulting in Martyn’s introduction to Lady Gregory. At their split in 1900, Martyn said: ‘henceforth I will pay for nobody’s plays but by own’ (ibid.)
W. B. Yeats (2): See also T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Methuen 1965 rev. edn.), recounting Yeats’s dream and his autobiographical record of the same: ‘In “The Stirring of the Bones” he tells how, when staying with Martyn at Tullyra, he decided that he must make his invocation to the moon. After he had repeated the ritual for eight or nine nights, he saw a galloping centaur, and a moment later “a naked woman of incredible beauty, standing upon a pedestal and shooting an arrow at a star”. The same night Symons, also staying at Tullyra, wrote a poem of great beauty on this theme, but without the bow and arrow. On Symons’ return to London, he found a story, sent to The Savoy by Fiona MacLeod, in which there was a vision of a woman shooting an arrow into the sky; and later of an arrow shot at a faun that pierced the faun’s body and remained, the faun’s heart torn out and clinging to it, embedded in a tree. The child of one of Mathers, pupils had come running in from the garden crying out: “Oh, mother, I have seen a woman shooting an arrow into the sky [164] and I am afraid that she has killed God.” A few months later, a little cousin dreamed of a man who shot a star with a gun and the star fell down; but “I do not think”, the child said, “it minded dying because it was so very old”, and presently the child saw the star lying in a cradle.’ (Autobiographies, p.372; Henn, op. cit., p.165.)
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George Russell - concluding a letter to W. B. Yeats (May 1903): ‘[...] Martyn has heroism thrust on him and his stay in the Kildare St. Club becomes one of the humours of Dublin. He says it is becoming serious for him for if they expel him he won’t be able anywhere else to get a bed for 2/6 a night so comfortably. Yours ever, Geo. W. Russell.’ (In Alan Denson, ed., Letters from AE, London: Abelard-Schuman 1961, p.47.)
Lady Gregory remarks of Mrs. Martyn’s neo-Gothic mansion that her husband had advised Martyn while at Oxford ‘not to build that large addition to his old castle, until at least his own taste and opinion were formed’. She goes on, ‘and though the forces were too strong, his mother and her surroundings, he often regretted that he had not the strength to take that advice.’ (7 December, 1923; Daniel Murphy, ed., Journals: II, 1987, p.494.)
James Joyce (1): According to Joyce, Martyn he was ‘disabled by an incorrigible style’ (”Day of the Rabblement”, Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason, 1959, p.71).
James Joyce (2): In Ulysses (1922), Haines has this to say of Moore and Martin, “Did you hear Miss [Susan] Mitchell’s joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it?” (Ulysses, Bodley ed., p.246).
James Joyce (3): see Joyce’s programme notice for The Heather Field, written for the English Players’ production in Zurich, March 1919: ‘[...] he [Martyn] follows the school of Ibsen and therefore occupies a unique position in Ireland, as the dramatists writing for the National Theatre have chiefly devoted their energies to peasant drama.’ (Critical Writings, Viking Press 1967, p.251.) There follows a summary of the plot of the Heather Field, concerning Carden Tyrell and his wife, who are now living ‘on bad terms’ with each other.
James Joyce (4): Joyce held a copy of The Heather Field (London: Duckworth 1917), stamped “J. J.” among his books in Trieste (see Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of James Joyce, London: Faber, Appendix; p.117.) [See also Ann Saddlemyer, infra.]
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G. Wilson Knight regards Martyn’s Maeve and his An Enchanted Sea as ‘Graeco-Irish dreams’ and compares them with Sean O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned (‘a near analogy in Irish drama [... &c.]’). See Knight, ‘Ever a Fighter’, in Ronald Ayling, ed., Sean O’Casey: Modern Judgements (1969), p.179.
Austin Clarke reports in A Penny in the Clouds (London: Routledge 1968) that, when asked whether he had every read his great friend George Moore’s Hail & Farewell - in which he appears as an absurd character - Martyn exclaimed, ‘Good heavens! I wouldn’t dream of doing so’ (See Clarke, op. cit., Chap.2.)
Ann Saddlemyer, ‘James Joyce and the Irish Dramatic Movement’, in James Joyce: A Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982) [on Martyn & Moore:] ‘Both Edward Martyn and his cousin George Moore had made their pilgrimage to Bayreuth, even before the publication of Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite; one of Moore’s closest friends was the editor of La Revue wagnérienne, Édouard Dujardin, [...].’ (p.190.)
[On Martyn and Joyce:] ‘Moore acknowledged that the essay [“The Day of the Rabblement”] was ’preposterously clever”, but his influence - which was dependent on Martyn’s - was waning; within a year he and Yeats would quarrel over the ownership of the plot to Where There is Nothing. Martyn’s An [193] Enchanted Sea, written in emulation of The Lady from the Sea and more powerful than his dream play Maeve, had been ignored; by 1903 he was sufficiently disillusioned to set up in opposition to the movement he had helped establish, hiring a professional company which, directed by Moore, performed The Heather Field and A Doll’s House in June and, the following year, An Enchanted Sea. Martyn never referred publicly to Joyce, but a heavy-handed satire of Yeats, Lady Gregory, Moore and himself, which expresses charges similar to Joyce’s, was published in 1907 - Romulus and Remus, or The Makers of Delights. In one of his later plays, The Dream Physician, Joyce himself appears, thinly disguised, in the sympathetic role of Otho Gerrard, a flamboyant idealistic poet longing for the unattainable Moon while comparing everyone else’s foibles to his own “magnificent” intellect; significantly, Martyn has written himself into the play also - as Otho Gerrard’s father. In 1919 Joyce unwittingly repaid the compliment by persuading the English Players of Zurich to produce The Heather Field, in his programme note writing approvingly of this “accomplished musician and man of letters” who, as a follower of the school of Ibsen, occupied “a unique position in Ireland”. (p.194.)
Martin Dowling, ‘“Thought-Tormented Music”: Joyce and the Music of the Irish Revival’, in James Joyce Quarterly (Spring-Summer 2008): ‘Edward Martyn distinguishes between “the true thing descended from the bards” and the “vulgar stuff given us in many collections of so-called Irish music”; the former, he claims, cannot be rendered on keyed instruments, nor can it be captured in scripted form because of the elusiveness of the scales and intervals.’ (p.438; citing Martyn, ‘The Gaelic League and Irish Music’, in Irish Review, 1, Nov. 1911, p.449).
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References
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives excerpts from Morgante the Lesser and The Heather Field.
D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama (Cambridge UP 1984), lists listing ‘The Heather Field’ and ‘Maeve’, Two Plays, intro. by George Moore (Lon. 1899); The Tale of a Town and an Enchanted Sea (Kilkenny 1902).
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 , selects The Heather Field [568-97], played at the Ancient Concert Rooms [Pearse St.], 9 May 1899; notes debt to Ibsen and calls it an important example of the kind of play that would emerge in opposition to the experimental and risky enterprise of Yeatsian drama; George Moore regarded as amateur [D. E. S. Maxwell, ed.], 562, 565 [(re. Durras House]; 626n; 779, 847 [his gentry status]; 1218 [Connacht representative on Irish Agricultural Organisation Society]; BIOG & COMM, 716-17 [as supra].
Catalogues: Hyland Catalogue (1995) lists The Heather Field, A Play in Three Acts (1917). Belfast Central Public Library holds Dream Physician (1918); Grangecolman (1912); The Heather Field (1917); Maeve (1917); Tale of A Town and An Enchanted Sea (1902).
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Quotations| ‘A Plea for a National Theatre in Ireland’, in Samhain, 1 (Oct. 1901), pp.14-15. |
| ‘[T]here are many movements now for the encouragement of Irish manufacture in all its branches and for preventing the scandalous outpouring of money into the pockets of Englishmen and other foreigners. [Discusses development of native movement in Irish church art.] ... But there is another form of art besides church art in Ireland which needs reform, and for which there is an equally large demand, supplied as usual, by the foreigner, and, as usual, badly supplied, almost invariably. I refer to the plays supplied to our theatres by the strolling English companies of actors. it would be interesting to know how much money yearly those companies take out of Ireland as a reward for Anglicising and corrupting the taste of the Irish people. It must be as enormous even as the sum we pay the foreign purveyor of church art for disfiguring our churches. We have grappled with, and, I think, solved the problem of nationalising church art. Is it not time that our dramatic art also should be placed on a national basis? Are we so degenerate that we cannot meet this demand also by a supply of national art? The first requisite is to provide a stock company of native artists because the foreign strollers are too wedded to the debased art of English to fall in with the change. This can only be done by instituting a school for the training of actors and actresses, a most important branch of which should be devoted to teaching them to act plays in the Irish language. Not it is quite legal and feasible to obtain a grant from the Department of Technical Instruction for this purpose which is the same in principle as the teaching of stained glass manufacture. It is a home industry in the best sense, and means a vast economic saving to the country, besides being a most refining educational influence [14] upon the artistic and moral character of the nation. I think it will not be difficult to make the enlightened Vice-President and Secretary of the Department understand this. With a company of artists such as I have described we might put before the people of Ireland native works, also translations of the dramatic masterpieces of all lands, for it is only by accustoming a public to the highest art that it can be led to appreciate art, and that dramatists may be inspired to work in the great art tradition.’ |
Ibsenite: ‘When, out of the psychological subtleties of the characters of Alfred and Rita Allmers, the respective mental tragedies of husband and wife rise to a climax of conflict, there is brought home to an audience with tremendous impressiveness how greater far is the dramatic situation of psychology than that of the mere exteriority expressed only in bodily action.’ (Quoted in Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival, London: Jonathan Cape, 1930, p.143; cited in Ann Saddlemyer, ‘James Jyce and the Irish Dramatic Movement’, in James Joyce: An Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p.191.)
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Notes
Romulus and Remus; or, The Makers of Delights (1907) is a ‘symbolist extravaganza’ in which Denis D’Oran, the hairdresser, has two assists, Romulus Malone and Remus Delany, while Daisy Houlihan is the shopwoman, with Conrucopia Moynihan as a customer in search of a husband. The characters correspond parodically to Martyn, Moore, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Miss Horniman. (See Ann Saddlemyer, ‘James Jyce and the Irish Dramatic Movement’, in James Joyce: An Joyce International Perspective, ed. Suheil Bushrui & Benstock, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1982, p.208 [n.20].) Saddlemyer attributes the successful identification of the characters to Patricia McFate in her introduction to The Dream Physician [... &c.] (Chicago: De Paul UP 1972).
W. P. Ryan’s anti-clerical novel The Plough and the Cross (1910) contains a fictional representation of Edward Martyn (see Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction, Dublin: Maunsel 1919, p.249.)
Patrick MacGill calls the wealthy family in The Carpenter of Orra (1924) is called Martyn, Sir Henry being an exploiter and a swindler.
Jack B. Yeats writes to John Quinn: ‘[...] We went to see a play of Edward Martyns in Dublin the other day The Dream Physician. All about George Moore, not very good but amusing enough in parts.’ (Letter of 17 Dec. 1914; printed in Declan J. Foley, ed. & intro., The Only Art: Jack B. Yeats - Letters from his Father John Butler Yeats; Essays on Their Works, Dublin: Lilliput Press 2008, p.88.)
Maeve, a two act play (Feb. 1900), concerns ‘a sweet symbol of Ireland in her subjection’ as the title character who faces a forced union with Hugh Fitz-Walter, ‘a bandit like his English predecessors’.
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Kildare St. Club: For an account of his black-balling at the Kildare St. Club as a result of his Boer sympathies, and his remarks to Daisy Fingal on why he should wish to stay in a club where he wasn’t wanted (‘It suits me and the food is good’), see Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Ascendancy (1987), 110-13.
Choir? boys!: Martyn contributed a series of letter to The Leader lamenting the state of Irish church music and particularly the laxity of allowing ‘such an unecclesiastical and unaesthetic custom to prevail as the singing of women in choir.’ (Leader, Oct.-Dec. 1900).
P. Ó Cathasaigh [Seán O’Casey], Story of the Citizen Army (Maunsel 1919), Chap X, contains an epigraph from Martyn: ‘My Country Claims me all, claims every passion; / Her liberty henceforth be all my thought! / Though with a brother’s life yet cheaply bought; / For her my own I’d willingly resign, / And say, with transport, that the gain was mine.’ [c.p.51]
Vincent Cosgrave, who could write music, copied down Palestrina recitations at the Pro-Cathedral for James Joyce (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1957)..
Portraits: An oil portrait of Martyn by Norman French McLachlan (d.1978) presented to the National Gallery of Ireland by Joseph Holloway is reproduced in Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Anglo-Irish (London: Constable 1987).
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