Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Act Two of Sean O’Casey’s 1926 play, The Plough and the Stars, has appeared onstage at the Abbey theatre between 1991 and 2016. The chapter shows how these four versions of O’Casey’s script navigate a set of contemporary concerns, from historical revisionism, through the Celtic Tiger boom, to the economic crash, and into the era when various kinds of institutional and state abuse have been revealed. Shifts in performance style also reveal changes in thinking about theatrical form in Ireland and help illuminate the role of the Irish national theatre during a period when other nearby national theatres have come to operate in profoundly different ways.