1859: b., 30 Jan. Tulira Castle [vars.Tullyra, and Tillyra; also Masonbrook DIH], Ardrahan, Co Galway, last in the line of a Catholic landed family settled in Ireland since the twelfth century and exempted from penal laws by an act of Queen Anne; educ. at Beaumont College, Windsor, and Christ Church, Oxford; grad. 1879; 1886: adversely impressed by socialist rally of 20,000 dockers and suffragists in Trafalgar Square, London, 13 Nov. 1886; returns to Tulira, taking up up residence in tower of the castle; engages on writing Morgante the Lesser (1890), based on Luigi Pulci’s medieval Morgante Maggiore and published under pseud. ‘Sirius’ (1890); supports Gaelic League; encourages George Moore to return to Ireland with a telegram saying, ‘The sceptre of intelligence has passed from London to Dublin’ (as reported in Ave)); visited by W. B. Yeats at Tulirea, and introduced him to Lady Gregory, a Galway neighbour, in 1896; 1899: co-fnds. Irish Literature Theatre acting as chief guarantor with a personal donation of £130 (and £30 from his mother), 1899; discovered John McCormack and subvented his musical training; meets Vincent O’Brien, music teacher at St. Mary’s Place CBS and director of the Clarendon St. Carmelite Church Boys’ Choir; objects to ‘uncatholic and heretical’ passages in The Countess Cathleen (1899); finances his own productions commencing with The Heather Field (1899), an Ibsenite play in which Carden Tyrrell defends a field symbolic of Celtic purity and lost innocence; joins Gerald O’Donovan in decorating Loughrea Cathedral; supports church architecture reform and stain-glass movement;1900: produces Maeve, a two act play (Feb. 1900); publishes correspondence with Lords Clonbrook and Ashbourne on resignation from Deputy Lieutenantship & Peace Commissionership of Co. Galway (Daily Express, 24 March 1900); contribs. letters lamenting the state of Irish church music and the use of women singers in church (Leader, Oct.-Dec. 1900); issues a Gaelic League pamphlet on Ireland’s Battle for Her Language (c.1900), criticising the Board of National Education; splits with Yeats and Lady Gregory; contrib. to Beltaine, No. 2, lamenting ‘efforts of certain persons and institutions whose aim seems to be to create in Ireland a sort of shabby England’, (February 1900); 1901: writes a ‘plea’ for a National Theatre to Samhain (1901) though when asked for funds in 1901, he said, ‘Henceforth I will pay for nobody’s plays but my own’; offended by Moore’s and Yeats’s treatment of A Tale of a Town (1902); endows Pro-Cathedral Palestrina Choir with endowment of £10,000, Nov. 1902, engaging Vincent O’Brien as director; invites Dom Gatard from Solesmes to train the singers; 1903: fnd. Palestrina Choir, endowing a chair in the Pro-Cathedral to improve liturgical music, becoming Schola Cantorum of the Archdiocese, 1903; chaired National Council of Cumann na nGaedhael protesting visit of Edward VII, 1903; asked by Maud Gonne to persuade Lord Mayor Timothy Harrington not greet the King; writes to Freeman’s Journal opposing visit of Edward VII unless accompanied by Home Rule undertakings, and called for hissing campaign throughout Ireland; member of first board of Abbey Theatre, 1904; First President of Sinn Féin, 1904-08, chairing the National Council at the Rotunda, 28 Nov. 1905; 1906: with George Russell, et al., co-fnds. Theatre of Ireland, 1906, a break-away from the National Theatre; co-fnds. Feis Cheoil; black-balled in the Kildare St. Club and successfully fights court action against its members; publishes ‘The Genius of the Villa Albani’, a sonnet invoking Winckelman as Master and prob. written in 1881 (The Leader, 29 April 1911); refused offer to stand in Galway election; issued Grangecolman (1912); 1914: fnds. Irish Theatre with Mary Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh, et al., at Hardwicke St., urging ‘the production of non-peasant drama by Irishmen, of plays in the Irish language, and of English translations of European masterworks for the theatre’ (‘Plea, &c.’); writes to the Freeman objecting to the appointment of Fr. Bewerunge to NUI Chair of Music, March 1914; issued The Dream Physician (1914); 1916: Irish Theatre remains in operation despite death or imprisonment of some members after 1916 Rising; writes Regina Eyre (1919), an unpublished play in which he reversed the gender of the Hamlet characters and set the scene in Kerry; gravely affected by arthritis in later years; lives reclusively at Tulira Castle;1923; d. 5 Dec., having stipulated that his body donated to Dublin teaching hospital and that he be buried in a pauper’s grave, permitting only the chanting to ‘Benedictus Dominus Deus Meus’ at his funeral; the wife of Baron Hemphill was his heir; his correspondence is held in the National Library of Ireland [MS 13068, &c.]; there is a portrait by Norman French McLachlan. DIB DIW DIH DIL/2 OCEL JMC FDA OCIL |
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Works
Fiction, [pseud. “Sirius”,] Morgante the Lesser: His
Notorious Life and Wonderful Deeds (London: Swan Sonnenschein 1890).
Plays, The Heather Field: A Play in Three Acts and Maeve: A Psychological Drama in Two Acts, intro. by George Moore (London: Duckworth 1899; rep. 1917) [ rep. separately in Irish Drama Series, vols. 1 & 2, The Heather Field (Chicago: De Paul UP 1966), Maeve (Chicago: De Paul UP 1967)]; ‘A Plea for a National Theatre in Ireland’, in Samhain, 1 (Oct. 1901), pp.14-15; The Place-Hunters: A Political Comedy in One Act, in The Leader (26 July 1902); The Tale of a Town: A Comedy of Affairs in Five Acts, and An Enchanted Sea: A Play in Four Acts (Kilkenny: Standish O’Grady; London: Fisher Unwin 1902); Romulus and Remus; or, The Makers of Delights; A Symbolist Extravaganza in One Act, in The Irish People (21 Dec. 1907), [Christmas Suppl.], pp.1-2; Grangecolman: A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts (Dublin: Maunsel 1912); The Dream Physician: A Play in Five Acts (Dublin: Talbot 1914) [rep. in Irish Drama Series, vol. 7 (Chicago: De Paul UP 1972)]; David Eakin & Michael Case, eds. Selected Plays by George Moore and Edward Martyn (Washington: Catholic University of America Press 1995).
Miscellaneous, ‘Mr Martyn and the National Anthem’ (Daily Express [Dublin], 24 March 1900); ‘A Comparison Between Irish and English Stage Audiences’, in Beltaine, 2 (Feb. 1900); ‘A Plea for the Revival of the Irish Literary Theatre’, in The Irish Review, 4 (April 1914), pp.79-84; ‘The Cherry Orchard of Tchekoff’ [Chekhov], in New Ireland, 8 (21 June 1919), pp.108-09. Preface to Robert Elliott, Art and Ireland (1902; Kennikat facs. rep. 1970), ill.
Bibliographical details
George Moore and Edward Martyn, Selected Plays, ed. David B. Eaken
and Michael Case [Irish Dramatic Selections] (Washington: Catholic UP
1996), 362pp. [contains Moore, ‘The Strike at Arlingford’; ‘The
Bending of the Bough’; ‘The Coming of Gabrielle’; ‘The
Passing of the Essenes’; Martyn, ‘The Heather Field’; ‘Maeve’;
The Tale of the Town’; An Enchanted Sea’].
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Criticism
J. MacDonagh, ‘Edward Martyn’, in The Dublin Magazine,
1 (Feb. 1924), pp.465-67.
Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London: Jonathan Cape 1930; [1936] Lemma Publ. Corp. 1976).
George Moore, Hail and Farewell, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann 1937); Una Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement (London: Methuen 1939).
Thomas MacGreevy and Maud Gonne [memoirs], in Father Mathew Record (April 1943), q.pp.
Sister Marie-Thérèse Courtney, Edward Martyn and the Irish Theatre (NY: Vantage 1956).
Jan Setterquist, Ibsen and the Beginnings of Anglo-Irish Drama, II, Edward Martyn (Uppsala: Lundquist 1960).
Patricia McFate, ‘The Bending of the Bough and The Heather Field’, in Éire-Ireland, 8 (Spring 1973). pp.52-61.
Richard Fallis, The Irish Renaissance (Syracuse: Syracuse UP 1977).
William J. Feeney, ed., Edward Martyn's Irish Theatre: Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, Vol. 2, (Newark: Proscenium 1980).
Wayne Hall, ‘Edward Martyn: Politics and Drama of Ice’, in Éire-Ireland, 15 (Summer 1980), pp.113-22.
William J. Feeney, Drama in Hardwicke Street: A History of the Irish Theatre Company (London/Toronto: AUP 1984) [var. Rutherford, Madison & Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP 1984).
J. C. M. Nolan, ‘Edward Martyn and Guests at Tulira’, in Irish Arts Review, 10 (1994), pp.167-73.
J. C. M. Nolan, ‘The First President of Sinn Féin: Edward Martyn’, Irish Studies Review, 15 (Summer 1996), pp.27-33.
Adrian Frazier, ‘Paris, Dublin: Looking at George Moore Looking at Manet’, in New Hibernia Review, 1, 1 (Spring 1997), pp.19-30 [passim].
J. C. M. Nolan, ‘Edward Martyn and the Founding of Dublin’s Palestrina Choir’, in New Hibernian Review, 4, 1 (Spring 2000), pp.89-102.
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Notes
Justin
McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic
Univ. of America 1904), gives excerpts from Morgante the Lesser
and The Heather Field.
D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama (Cambridge UP 1984), lists listing ‘The Heather Field’ and ‘Maeve’, Two Plays, intro. by George Moore (Lon. 1899); The Tale of a Town and an Enchanted Sea (Kilkenny 1902).
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 , selects The Heather Field [568-97], played at the Ancient Concert Rooms [Pearse St.], 9 May 1899; notes debt to Ibsen and calls it an important example of the kind of play that would emerge in opposition to the experimental and risky enterprise of Yeatsian drama; George Moore regarded as amateur [D. E. S. Maxwell, ed.], 562, 565 [(re. Durras House]; 626n; 779, 847 [his gentry status]; 1218 [Connacht representative on Irish Agricultural Organisation Society]; BIOG & COMM, 716-17 [as supra].
Moore’s idée fixe: Edward Martyn served as a model for characters in George Moore’ s novels A Mere Accident and Mike Fletcher and was called ‘the sketch of a great man’ by him (Salve, p.211), while Moore also alleged that he founded choirs not from his love of music but from his love of choir-boys. Discussions of Martyn’s Catholic ‘soul’ form a central strand in the narrative in George Moore’s Hail and Farewell (1911-14).
W. B. Yeats’s visited at Tulira in 1896 is narrated in his Autobiographies where he gives an account of the ‘vision of Diana’ (p.371), resulting in Martyn's introduction to Lady Gregory. At their split in 1900, Martyn said: ‘henceforth I will pay for nobody’s plays but by own’ (ibid.)
Lady Gregory remarks of Mrs. Martyn’s neo-Gothic mansion that her husband had advised Martyn while at Oxford ‘not to build that large addition to his old castle, until at least his own taste and opinion were formed’. She goes on, ‘and though the forces were too strong, his mother and her surroundings, he often regretted that he had not the strength to take that advice.’ (7 December, 1923; Daniel Murphy, ed., Journals: II, 1987, p.494.)
James Joyce: In Ulysses (1922), Haines has this to say of Moore and Martin, "Did you hear Miss [Susan] Mitchell’s joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it?" (Ulysses, Bodley ed., p.246). According to Joyce, Martin he was ‘disabled by an incorrigible style’ ("Day of the Rabblement", Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason, 1959, p.71). Also, Joyce held a copy of The Heather Field (London: Duckworth 1917), stamped "J. J." among his books in Trieste (see Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of James Joyce, London: Faber, Appendix; p.117.)
W. P. Ryan’s anti-clerical novel The Plough and the Cross (1910) contains a fictional representation of Edward Martyn (see Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction, Dublin: Maunsel 1919, p.249.)
Patrick MacGill calls the wealthy family in The Carpenter of Orra (1924) is called Martyn, Sir Henry being an exploiter and a swindler.
Maeve, a two act play (Feb. 1900), concerns ‘a sweet symbol of Ireland in her subjection’ as the title character who faces a forced union with Hugh Fitz-Walter, ‘a bandit like his English predecessors’.
Kildare St. Club: For an account of his black-balling at the Kildare St. Club as a result of his Boer sympathies, and his remarks to Daisy Fingal on why he should wish to stay in a club where he wasn’t wanted (‘It suits me and the food is good’), see Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Ascendancy (1987), 110-13.
Martyn contributed a series of letter to The Leader lamenting the state of Irish church music and particularly the laxity of allowing ‘such an unecclesiastical and unaesthetic custom to prevail as the singing of women in choir’ (Leader, Oct.-Dec. 1900).
P. Ó Cathasaigh [Seán O’Casey], Story of the Citizen Army (Maunsel 1919), Chap X, contains an epigraph from Martyn: ‘My Country Claims me all, claims every passion; / Her liberty henceforth be all my thought! / Though with a brother’s life yet cheaply bought; / For her my own I’d willingly resign, / And say, with transport, that the gain was mine.’ [c.p.51]
G. Wilson Knight regards Martyn’s Maeve and his An Enchanted Sea as ‘Graeco-Irish dreams’ and compares them with Sean O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned (‘a near analogy in Irish drama [... &c.]’). See Knight, ‘Ever a Fighter’, in Ronald Ayling, ed., Sean O’Casey: Modern Judgements (1969), p.179.
Austin Clarke reports in A Penny in the Clouds (London: Routledge 1968) that, when asked whether he had every read his great friend George Moore’s Hail & Farewell - in which he appears as an absurd character - Martyn exclaimed, ‘Good heavens! I wouldn’t dream of doing so’ (See Clarke, op. cit., Chap.2.).
Vincent Cosgrave, who could write music, copied down Palestrina recitations at the Pro-Cathedral for James Joyce (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1957)..
Portraits: An oil portrait of Martyn by Norman French McLachlan (d.1978) presented to the National Gallery of Ireland by Joseph Holloway is reproduced in Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Anglo-Irish (London: Constable 1987).
Hyland Catalogue (1995) lists , The Heather Field, A Play in Three Acts (1917)
Belfast Central Public Library holds Dream Physician (1918); Grangecolman (1912); The Heather Field (1917); Maeve (1917); Tale of A Town and An Enchanted Sea (1902).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)