Chapter 6 - Samuel Whyte and the Politics of Eighteenth-Century Irish Private Theatricals

Summary

This essay focuses on the contribution which the Dublin schoolteacher, writer, and elocutionist, Samuel Whyte, made to the Irish private theatrical movement and to Irish social, political, and cultural life in the 1760 and 1770s. The private plays Whyte directed and his writing on ’Bon Ton Theatricals’ reflect the moral, cultural, and political values of the Dublin Protestant professional class, and these values, I argue, were shaped by two other influential Irish reformers: the actor/manager, educational theorist, and elocutionist, Thomas Sheridan, and Charles Lucas, the populist politician. The sectarian strain of thinking that was part of the Lucasian brand of civic republicanism (Hill), however, also surfaces in the discourse on private theatricals, as I show through an analysis of the hostile response to the Macbeth which Luke Gardiner, a politician known for this pro-Catholic sympathies, staged at his Phoenix Park home in 1778, and a discussion of Whyte’s own poem The Theatre (1790) in which he laments the ascendancy of ‘Paddy’ and his unlettered ‘herd’ in the dramatic arena. Political issues are here translated into cultural ones but this private theatrical discourse nevertheless forms part of the larger contentious conversation on politics, culture, and religion in late eighteenth-century Ireland.