Goldsmith was a prominent member of the Irish diaspora in London. This chapter details recent research on the London’s Irish population in the eighteenth century and offers a picture of his many connections and friendships within this community, with particular reference to compatriots in his social and professional milieux. The chapter demonstrates how London saw a level of social intermingling and professional collaboration between Irish of different denominational origins which was hardly achievable in Ireland.

Ideas of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity were in flux throughout the eighteenth century. This chapter places Goldsmith’s comedies She Stoops to Conquer and The Good Natur’d Man at the heart of contemporary gender debates. The theatre was a significant site for the negotiation of gender where women’s sensitivity, modesty, and gentility were touted as positive social forces capable of reforming men and improving manners by conditioning women to please others. Goldsmith’s plays can be seen as part of the ‘feminization debate’ – British discourse which trumpeted the progressive effects of women on modern society while seeking to condemn perceived transgressions of an increasingly binary gender order.

Bronwen Walter draws on sociological concepts in its exploration of hidden nuances in relationships between Irish migrants and their descendants on the one hand and people of English background on the other. The chapter draws on qualitative data from ten discussion groups with second generation Irish ‘experts’ in four locations in England – London, Manchester, Coventry and Banbury. Four themes are identified which illustrate major areas of cultural difference: language, religiosity, the importance of family and sociability. The author argues that the widespread failure to recognize them has led to inequalities in many parts of society.

This chapter focuses on the ‘Irish’ plays of Dion Boucicault who dominated the world of nineteenth-century anglophone theatre with commercial and critical successes in London, New York and Dublin. His crowd-pleasing melodramas rejected the crude stereotype of the Stage Irishman and provided positive protagonists for his global Irish audiences, while always remaining alert to the commercial imperative. However, in the period of the Literary Revival Boucicault’s plays were seen as perpetuating an image of Ireland as ‘the home of buffoonery and easy sentiment’. Brian Friel’s later equation of Boucicault’s plays with pantomime continued this dismissal of the playwright and none of his work was performed at the Abbey until 1967. Since the publication of David Krause’s Dolmen Press Boucicault in 1964, he has been regarded in more positive, if complex terms and, as Fintan O’Toole argues, if you exclude Boucicault ‘you begin to seriously distort the nature of what the theatrical canon might be’.

The Introduction sketches the main arguments of the book and introduces the reader to the concepts of Greater Ireland and Hiberno–Roman Catholicism and to the workings of the Propaganda Fide and its relationship to the Irish Catholic diaspora.

The most common term used in connection with John O’Keeffe’s plays was ‘eccentric’, a descriptor used by his London critics to convey what they saw as the critical unorthodoxy and improbability of his popular drama. This chapter argues that in his pastoral dramas in particular, this irregularity registers the impact of a vernacular form of cosmopolitanism, the type of global consciousness that emerged in the eighteenth century as displaced populations began to make their way into metropolitan centers, bringing with them their culturally specific stories, loyalties and experiences. In O’Keeffe’s case, this imported body of knowledge came out of the culture of the Irish Catholic dispossessed and, as demonstrated through an analysis of The Shamrock (1783), The Poor Soldier (1783) and The Prisoner at Large (1787), this immigrant playwright used the pastoral genre initially to plead the case of the Irish masses. Arguments for tolerance, liberty and justice, however, become increasingly universalised in O’Keeffe’s later pastoral drama as evidenced by Wild Oats (1791) and The World in a Village (1793). In these two dramas, Burke suggests, the village is a global space, one that dramatises the discontents as well as the possibilities inherent in Enlightenment and modernity.

Macklin’s Henry the VII (1746) has received little critical attention. This chapter reads the play as part of a tradition of Irish history plays that were influenced by Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713). Addison’s themes of personal self-sacrifice, love of country and resistance to tyranny proved inspirational for Irish dramatists in the wake of the Declaratory Act (1720) as can be seen in William Philips’s Hibernia Freed (1722) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739). History plays then might offer an alternative genealogy of eighteenth-century Irish theatre which is often focused on comedies.