Beneath Iërne's banners

"The Dublin stage of the Restoration and the eighteenth century has largely been dismissed as "West British" and its plays for the most part have been forgotten. Christopher J. Wheatley examines the works by Protestant dramatists that reveal the complex alliances and fissures of Anglo-Irish society during the age of the Penal Laws. From Richard Head's Hic et Ubique (1663) to Mary O'Brien's The Fallen Patriot (1790), Wheatley shows how selected plays demonstrate that the Irish Protestants were far from a monolithic caste united by the shared interest of maintaining control over the Catholic majority. He traces the slow transition by which the English of Ireland came to think of themselves as Irish - without necessarily being prepared to allow Irish emancipation."--BOOK JACKET.