Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Plays of (ever) changing Ireland
- 2 Late nineteenth-century Irish theatre: before the Abbey – and beyond
- 3 The ideology of the Abbey Theatre
- 4 The theatre of William Butler Yeats
- 5 Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre drama: Ireland real and ideal
- 6 J. M. Synge, ‘national’ drama and the post-Protestant imagination
- 7 On the siting of doors and windows: aesthetics, ideology and Irish stage design
- 8 Oscar Wilde and the politics of style
- 9 George Bernard Shaw and Ireland
- 10 Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: disillusionment to delusion
- 11 Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr
- 12 Samuel Beckett and the countertradition
- 13 Brian Friel’s sense of place
- 14 The Field Day Theatre Company
- 15 Tom Murphy and the children of loss
- 16 Reconstructing history in the Irish history play
- 17 The Abbey Theatre and the Irish state
- 18 Staging contemporary Ireland
- 19 The Revival revised
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
3 - The ideology of the Abbey Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 Plays of (ever) changing Ireland
- 2 Late nineteenth-century Irish theatre: before the Abbey – and beyond
- 3 The ideology of the Abbey Theatre
- 4 The theatre of William Butler Yeats
- 5 Lady Gregory’s Abbey Theatre drama: Ireland real and ideal
- 6 J. M. Synge, ‘national’ drama and the post-Protestant imagination
- 7 On the siting of doors and windows: aesthetics, ideology and Irish stage design
- 8 Oscar Wilde and the politics of style
- 9 George Bernard Shaw and Ireland
- 10 Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy: disillusionment to delusion
- 11 Ireland’s ‘exiled’ women playwrights: Teresa Deevy and Marina Carr
- 12 Samuel Beckett and the countertradition
- 13 Brian Friel’s sense of place
- 14 The Field Day Theatre Company
- 15 Tom Murphy and the children of loss
- 16 Reconstructing history in the Irish history play
- 17 The Abbey Theatre and the Irish state
- 18 Staging contemporary Ireland
- 19 The Revival revised
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Series List
Summary
'Ideology' is not simply, though a thesaurus equates them, 'thought'; it can also refer to unconscious assumptions that place a boundary beyond which thought cannot go. The most influential definitions of the concept are those of Karl Marx: 'The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production,' and, more particularly, 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.' Such ideas 'rule' because it is only through them that a person can imagine a relationship to 'transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History'. Both the dominant and subordinate classes live within a historical thought-world, which holds all the thought the masters have and all the mastered get. 'False consciousness' is thus unconscious of all that is false in its picture of the world. The landlord class cannot see the tenant truly and the tenants can’t either; similarly for workers and employers and all other echoes of the master/slave relationship. Ideology is given glamour by the best minds that schools can educate, publishers can publish or money can buy. Seeking instruction or entertainment, people become willing partners in their own subjection. It is a sorry state of affairs as Marx describes it, this prison-house of ideology.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama , pp. 33 - 46Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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