Page:The Gael Vol XXII January to December 1903.djvu/29

14 Departing willingly from such an atmosphere, we come to Farquhar's comedy of "The Twin Rivals." which, as presented at Drury Lane in 1703, refreshingly reproduces our old friend Teague. Although kept off the scene until the third act, the droll takes a by no means Inconspicuous part in the action, and proves on acquaintance to be a very humorous specimen of the lower class Milesian. Bubbling over with mother wit, he is asked how he intends to live at a Juncture when his master has Just experienced a rude reversal of fortune. "By eating, dear joy," he replies, "fen I can get it, and by sleeping fen I can get none—tish the fashion of Ireland."

When Richard Brinsley Sheridan's father was a boy at school, somewhere about the year 1740, he wrote a farce called "Captain O'Blunder; or The Brave Irishman," basing his plot on the "Pourceaugnac" of Moliere. As most pieces in which poor Paddy had previously figured had held him up to view in somewhat unfavorable light, small wonder that even an unpretentious trifle presenting a good-humored treatment of a blundering, affected native met with a hearty reception from an alert Dublin audience. Throughout the illimitable domains of France nothing funnier is to be found than the scene in which the Captain, chafing under the indignity thrust upon him by the miserable little Frenchman, his rival in love, who has called him "praty-face," makes the quaking whipper-snapper consume a fine, raw specimen of the esculent tuber.

Isaac Sparks, the original Captain O'Blunder, was so popular in the character in Dublin that public-house signs of him as the brave Irishman abounded. One day, in coming out of a tavern he passed under one of these and a chair-man standing by, looking first at the original with great admiration and then at the copy, vociferated: "Oh, there you are, above and below!" We present a portrait of Sparks In another of his Irish characters, Foigard, in "The Beaux Stratagem."

Sheridan's farce is otherwise noteworthy from the fact that Its central figure formed the prototype of Sir Callagan O'Brallaghan in Macklin's famous comedy, "Love à la Mode." The knight was originally acted by Moody, who is said to have been the first player to bring the stage Irishman into repute, and to render the character one of a distinct line, whereby a performer might acquire position and moderate fame. But, as Lady Morgan once remarked, before the days of Cumberland's Major O'Flagherty, English audiences were satisfied with poor acting in Irish parts, "for they had not yet got beyond the conventional delineation of Teague and Father Foigard. types of Irish savagery and Catholic Jesuitism."

When Hugh Kelly, that redoubtable champion of sentimental insipidities, had his "School for Wives" produced at Drury Lane in 1774, it was found that the man who first drew breath at Killarney had sketched an excellent Irishman in the muddle-headed, wholesouled Connolly, without betraying partiality on the one hand, or descending into caricature on the other. It is matter of common theatrical history that when Sheridan's maiden effort, "The Rivals," was produced at Covent Garden in January 1775, the play was well-nigh damned through the incompetence of Lee, who was cast for Sir Lucius. When the role was given to Clinch, the atmosphere cleared at once, the comedy gaining life, and the actor reputation by the change.

Early In March. 1803, a play was produced at Covent Garden which, to adopt the words of Boaden, "seized upon general admiration as a charm, and has held it as by a patent" The piece was none other than Colman's comedy of "John Bull," in which handsome Jack Johnstone represented Dennis Bulgruddery, and sang a whimsical epilogue to an old Irish air. Although