Book Review: Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland

'In tracing the progress of society,' observed Joseph Cooper Walker in 1788, we discover the Drama amongst the first amusements of man. It is therefore very extraordinary that we cannot discover any vestiges of the Drama amongst the remains of the Irish Bard'. Walker's Historical Essay on the Irish Stage' stands at the beginning of Irish theatre history as a discipline, a distinction it shares with Robert Hitchcock's History of the Irish Stage. From the beginning, Cooper and Hitchcock define what would become one of Irish theatre's central puzzles: why was there no theatre in pre-conquest Gaelic culture

Recollection and Social Status

Television sets appeared in homes across the world during the 1950s and 1960s. Early audiences were researched in terms of ratings and so on, but the perceptions and experiences of early television viewers went unrecorded. There are no ready-made, bottom–up companion pieces to top–down institutional histories. In the absence of such work, life- story research offers one of our best means of attempting to capture the experiences of early viewers. This chapter offers an argument about the nature of memory. It argues that personal recollection, in memory interviews and other contexts, is practical; that people announce their pasts in a manner that preserves their identity and that is likely to maintain or improve their social standing. It is argued that it is the practical nature of recollection that makes personal memories diverse and, simultaneously, subject to social power and dominant values. The chapter concludes by offering a brief account of how this research was carried out

Book Review: Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland

'In tracing the progress of society,' observed Joseph Cooper Walker in 1788, we discover the Drama amongst the first amusements of man. It is therefore very extraordinary that we cannot discover any vestiges of the Drama amongst the remains of the Irish Bard'. Walker's Historical Essay on the Irish Stage' stands at the beginning of Irish theatre history as a discipline, a distinction it shares with Robert Hitchcock's History of the Irish Stage. From the beginning, Cooper and Hitchcock define what would become one of Irish theatre's central puzzles: why was there no theatre in pre-conquest Gaelic culture