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eBook details
- Title: Brushing History Against the Grain: The Renaissance Plays of Frank Mcguinness (Critical Essay)
- Author : Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 370 KB
Description
Although a medievalist by training, Frank McGuinness is peculiarly attracted to the Renaissance. Outside of the twentieth century, the historical period towards which he has gravitated most often is the early modern one. Innocence telescopes the early achievements and turbulent final years of the Italian baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and hinges on the fateful events of May 1606 that lastingly changed his career, Mutabilitie envisages the life of Edmund Spenser as Elizabethan colonist in North Cork in the 1580s and is set in the initial years of the plantation of Munster following the defeat of the second Desmond rebellion (1579-1583), and Speaking like Magpies is a symbolic recreation of the events in London surrounding the so-called Gunpowder plot of 1605 and the accession of James I in 1603. (1) All three plays are set in a vividly evoked moment in time, but they also treat history as a panorama or meta-text. The past is depicted with compelling immediacy by being translated into the present of the staged action, but it is also compressed, imaginatively rearranged, and daringly dismantled. Further, these texts are interlinked to the degree that they centre on moments of crisis and transition, and focus attention on highly problematic and often rebarbative protagonists. They, moreover, all broach personages and events that academic analysis can never satisfactorily explicate and set out to reflect on and powerfully revisit flashpoints within the written historical record. Above all, as will later be contended, these plays re-configure power relations by projecting subaltern perspectives and putting forward abject, queer, or female authority figures as alternative locuses of influence. This essay sets out to consider why the Renaissance exerts such a fascination for McGuinness and, more specifically, to establish why the particular juncture of the early seventeenth century has so frequently served as the chosen milieu of his plays. The theatrical worlds that Frank McGuinness creates are unsettlingly pluralist, heterodox, and unpredictable. His is an artistic vision that refuses to be pinned down or to constitute identifiable signatures and secure homeplaces for itself. It is the central business of a play by McGuinness to confound expectation and to urge us to adopt or at least entertain stances that run contrary to received opinion and popular belief. At first glance, his interest in the Renaissance may be explicated on these grounds alone, as it permits his roving imagination the amplitude to depict other worlds, to confront his audience with buried or censored realities, and to rethink perennially skewed and deeply discomfiting historical perspectives. Additionally, it will be proposed in this exploration that the early modern period allows McGuinness to treat certain of his key thematic concerns, to crystallize aspects of his aesthetic, and to reconnect with and harness the core energies and dynamics of theatre.
 "Brushing History Against the Grain: The Renaissance Plays of Frank Mcguinness (Critical Essay)" by Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}