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McGuinness's Experiment in the Renaissance Ireland: Focusing on Mutabilitie

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2013, 26(1), pp.207-240
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Yumi Hong 1

1명지대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Frank McGuinness is one of the representative contemporary Irish playwrights who has always delved into the issue of true Irish identity in postcolonial Ireland. He, born in the North, which is politically classified as the South, has grown up with ‘the Irish Conflict’ itself, experiencing the ‘inbetweeness’ crossing through borderlands. His plays, set in a variety of times and social economic situations beyond the boundaries of Ireland, consistently attempt to demolish the boundaries and divisions, unifying two conflicting opposites. In Mutabilitie, McGuinness takes the past when England pursued after its imperial goal in colonial Ireland as his laboratory to experiment the possibility of the peaceful co-existence of English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic in postcolonial Ireland. Focusing on his Mutabilitie, this paper explores his experiment in the Renaissance Ireland by examining how he changes historical facts and rewrites the histories using famous historical figures such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. This paper also examines how he tries to offer his own solution to postcolonial Ireland especially after the Belfast Agreement and the peaceful movement in Northern Ireland. And finally, this paper explores how McGuinness shows the possibility of difference without superiority, and otherness without hegemony by adopting the concept of ‘mutability’.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.