After his return to Ireland, Swift mixed with brash younger clerics such as Thomas Sheridan and Patrick Delany. Daniel Jackson’s large nose proved to be the unlikely source of profound ekphrastic pieces written by the group. Jovial bagatelles aside, ‘To Mr Delany’ displays a mid-career poet querying his craft. In ‘The Progress of Poetry’ urban hacks and farmer’s geese alike have grown fat and shrill. ‘Advice to the Grub-Street Verse-Writers’ ironically advises how modern hacks might trick a real poet – Pope – into writing original works into the margins of their books. Swift continued to rework British and Irish georgic and pastoral poetry with extraordinary inventiveness in the 1720s, whether in drolly dreary hospitality poems or pseudo-prophecy verses in the voice of St Patrick himself. Swift found new ways to insult his friends, including his hostess Lady Anne Acheson (‘The Journal of a Modern Lady’, ‘Death and Daphne’) and Matthew Pilkington (‘Directions for a Birth-Day Song’), as well as emerging poets for whom he had little taste. Such insults were couched within the unlikely genres with which he engaged, from the Ovidian courtship tale to the royal ode.

This essay focuses on the contribution which the Dublin schoolteacher, writer, and elocutionist, Samuel Whyte, made to the Irish private theatrical movement and to Irish social, political, and cultural life in the 1760 and 1770s. The private plays Whyte directed and his writing on ’Bon Ton Theatricals’ reflect the moral, cultural, and political values of the Dublin Protestant professional class, and these values, I argue, were shaped by two other influential Irish reformers: the actor/manager, educational theorist, and elocutionist, Thomas Sheridan, and Charles Lucas, the populist politician. The sectarian strain of thinking that was part of the Lucasian brand of civic republicanism (Hill), however, also surfaces in the discourse on private theatricals, as I show through an analysis of the hostile response to the Macbeth which Luke Gardiner, a politician known for this pro-Catholic sympathies, staged at his Phoenix Park home in 1778, and a discussion of Whyte’s own poem The Theatre (1790) in which he laments the ascendancy of ‘Paddy’ and his unlettered ‘herd’ in the dramatic arena. Political issues are here translated into cultural ones but this private theatrical discourse nevertheless forms part of the larger contentious conversation on politics, culture, and religion in late eighteenth-century Ireland.