If James Joyce’s final novel, Finnegans Wake, can be said to be set anywhere, it is in a pub in Chapelizod, in the west of Dublin along the River Liffey, beside the Phoenix Park, which marks the city’s historical western boundary. This had already been the location for gothic fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu in the nineteenth century, and the poet Thomas Kinsella would often return in his writing to the area around the Park, and nearby Inchicore, where he grew up. However, before any of these writers, the Phoenix Park itself developed a literature of its own in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was a place for promenading and for duelling. Today, the contrast between past and present is sharper in this part of the city than perhaps anywhere else. With the rapid geographical spread of Dublin since the middle of the twentieth century, new suburbs have spread far beyond the original western bounds of the city, extending into neighbouring counties. It is here that the challenge of finding literary forms adequate to the life of its citizens is felt most strongly in a city that has long defined itself as a writer’s city.

One of the works of the 1764 season at Covent Garden was a new burletta called Midas. Midas was, though, not ‘new’; it was only new to London: an early version of the work had its first staging privately in 1760 in Lurgan near Belfast, and the first professional version was at Dublin’s Crow Street Theatre in 1762. The professional version was prepared in response to the appearance in Dublin of an Italian burletta company, a company that had previously performed in London and would do so again after its Dublin engagement. This interplay of repertory between the two cities - of which Midas was the most obvious product - resulted both in a new genre and a tangling with Italian opera troupes. Midas was the product of a group of Irishmen, of whom Kane O’Hara, the librettist, was the most important and the most enigmatic; this chapter explores his role in the cross-currents of drama between the two cities. In so doing, Burden’s chapter re-contextualises the history of the burletta and offers a powerful demonstration that theatre historians cannot and should not write about London’s theatre in isolation: regional influences were important tributaries to the Georgian capital’s culture.

This chapter explores performances of Irish femininity in London and Dublin following the Act of Union, sketching a literary relationship between writers Sydney Owenson and Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and between the two cities. Although Sydney Owenson is usually thought of as a novelist, Taylor shows how her play The First Attempt (Dublin 1807) and the author’s own public performances drew on tropes employed by earlier male playwrights in order to (re)stage Anglo-Irish relations in feminine terms. At a special performance of The First Attempt, and in later social gatherings in London, Owenson, dressed in her “wild Irish girl’s” red silk mantle, strategically feminizes and civilizes an earlier Irish character type, such as John Henry Johnstone’s Teague from The Faithful Irishman. Similarly, Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu’s comedy The Sons of Erin (1812) restages and feminizes her brother’s earlier play, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s St. Patrick’s Day (1775), asserting that Enlightened, politicized Irish women hold the power to influence the Union beyond the stage doors.

The chapter argues that Owenson and Le Fanu’s feminized rewritings of male Irish playwrights chime with London’s desire for feminized pacifications of Irish characters following 1798. At the same time, Owenson and Le Fanu also offer a subversive message about women’s place in Anglo-Irish politics and Ireland’s place in the Union. Both women used the domestic English setting to stage Irish grievances right at the heart of the empire.