This dissertation addresses the need in contemporary Irish theatre scholarship for a more elastic examination of how history has been performed in Irish culture in the twentieth century. Combining methodological and theoretical approaches from the fields of Irish cultural studies, anthropology, performance studies and theatre history, this study offers a unique approach to analyzing how the past has been performed, challenged, and reinterpreted in various forms of performance, including funerals, parades, and traditional theatre. Beginning with an analysis of the common ways the canonical figures William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett thought of history and then envisioned it in performance, the project then widens its scope to consider how abstract narratives of Irish history predicated on failure were solidified in the performing body of the Irish actor Micheál MacLiammóir, who combined the tragic falls of the Irish Patriot Robert Emmet and Oscar Wilde with his own nostalgic style of performance. From there the work examines several performance events which occurred at moments of historical crisis in Ireland, including the 1898 Wolfe Tone commemorations and President Eamon de Valera's funeral in 1977. I examine how the history these events told was itself challenged and revised in actual theatrical pieces by Lady Augusta Gregory, Denis Johnston, and Thomas Kilroy (authors often sidelined in histories of Irish theatre). The work thus seeks to show that the Irish theatre existed as one strand in a dense web of interrelated forms of performance. When the theatre itself sought to perform history, the relationships between the various ways culture was imagined through performance become all the more apparent. Each chapter therefore traces how different understandings of historical reality were imagined and contested theatrically
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