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Irene is a Neoclassical tragedy written between 1737 and 1749 by Samuel Johnson. It has the distinction of being the work of Johnson’s that is most commonly agreed to have been his greatest failure.

Irene was Johnson’s only play, and was first performed on 6 February 1749 in a production by his friend and former pupil, David Garrick. The play was a commercial success, running for nine evenings and earning Johnson more money than anything else he had written up to that time. However, it was never revived during his lifetime, and in fact there is no subsequent evidence of any full-scale productions of Irene anywhere until 1999, making it one of the most unsuccessful plays ever written by a major author.

Background

Johnson wrote much of Irene in 1737 while teaching at Edial Hall School, the academy he had founded in 1735. Johnson spent his evenings working on his play while ignoring his wife Elizabeth (known as Tetty). This provoked David Garrick, his student, to perform a skit mocking the incidents, although the incidents he portrayed were more than likely his own fabrications. However, the play was written mostly for Mrs. Johnson; she was fond of it and hoped that it would be a success. It was her belief in the play that inspired Johnson to finish it and push to have it performed.

When Edial failed, Johnson travelled to London and brought the unfinished manuscript with him. When the play was finally complete in draft form Johnson attempted to persuade theatre managers to read it, but much to his and his wife's disappointment he met with no success. He seems to have continued to revise it over the next several years, since a manuscript notebook contains draft material made not earlier than June 1746. Johnson tried in 1741 to have the unperformed play printed, but this too failed.

The play was finally performed on 6 February 1749 for nine nights. Johnson received £195 17s. for the performances. Robert Dodsley published the playscript on 16 February 1749 and Johnson received an additional £100. Perhaps ironically, in view of its later eclipse, this made Irene the most financially lucrative work Johnson had yet written: during this period of his career, only the Dictionary earned him more money.

Play

Johnson's main source for the story of Irene was Richard Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603), although he also made some use of George Sandys's Relation of a Journey...containing a Description of the Turkish Empire (1615), Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale (1697) and Humphrey Prideaux's Life of Mahomet (1697).

In Knolles's work, the Sultan Mahomet conquers Constantinople in 1453 and captures a Greek Christian named Irene. He decides to take her as his mistress, and while pursuing her romantically he ignores his duties as a monarch. Soon, the kingdom is falling apart from neglect and the subjects begin to riot, so Mahomet kills Irene in order to prove his dedication to his people. Johnson alters the story to emphasis the idea of temptation. His Mahomet offers Irene a deal: if she becomes a Muslim, he will preserve her life and give her power at his court.

IRENE:
Forbear - O do not urge me to my ruin!
MAHOMET:
To state and pow'r I court thee, not to ruin:
Smile on my wishes, and command the globe.
Security shall spread her shield before thee,
And Love infold thee with his downy wings.
(Irene II. vii ll. 79-83)

Johnson goes on to emphasise how the pursuit of worldly power tends to corrupt. After Irene has accepted the Sultan's offer and abandoned her religious faith, she falls out with her virtuous friend Aspasia:

ASPASIA:
Ah! let me rather seek the convent's cell;
There where my thoughts, at intervals of pray'r,
Descend to range these mansions of misfortune,
Oft' shall I dwell on our disastrous friendship,
And shed the pitying tear for lost Irene.
IRENE:
Go, languish on in dull obscurity;
Thy dazzled soul with all its boasted greatness,
Shrinks at th' o'erpow'ring gleams of regal state,
Stoops from the blaze like a degenerate eagle,
And flies for shelter to the shades of life.
(Irene III. viii. ll. 93-102)

As a result of her decision to become Mahomet's queen, Irene becomes ensnared in a complex power struggle between his various advisors: the First Visier Cali Bassa, the Aga Mustapha, and the officer Abdalla, who is suffering from unrequited love for Aspasia. Mahomet becomes convinced that Bassa, with Irene's complicity, is plotting against him. Two of Abdalla's captains kill Irene, but with her dying words she reveals that Bassa's true accomplice was the Greek soldier Demetrius, Aspasia's lover, who has safely escaped with his loved one. On learning that Irene had not been conspiring against him, Mahomet is distraught:

MAHOMET:
Robb'd of the maid, with whom I wish'd to triumph,
No more I burn for fame or for dominion;
Success and conquest now are empty sounds,
Remorse and anguish seize on all my breast;
Those groves, whose shades embower'd the dear Irene,
Heard her last cries, and fann'd her dying beauties,
Shall hide me from the tasteless world for ever.
(Irene V. xii. ll. 42-48)

The play is written in blank verse but, as Walter Jackson Bate claims, "reads like heroic couplets from which the rhyme has been removed, and couplets in which the poet has so much anxiety to keep a strict regularity of meter that other considerations - even of style and rhythm alone - become sacrificed."

Stage History

The play would not be assured of production until Johnson's former student Garrick, by now established as one of the leading young actors of the time, took over the management of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This prompted Johnson to finish rewriting the play. Garrick changed the play's title to Mahomet and Irene and made some other alterations to the play to make it more acceptable to his sense of theatrical style. Johnson was initially opposed to the changes that Garrick wanted, and complained that Garrick "wants me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels". John Taylor soon worked out the dispute between Johnson and Garrick. Johnson later carried out Garrick's suggestions, which included revising Irene's death scene in order that she might be strangled onstage, instead of offstage as Johnson preferred.

Mahomet and Irene opened on 6 February 1749. Elizabeth Johnson was unable to attend the performance because of illness. Johnson arrived at the theatre in what he considered suitable for the "distinction of dress" required of an author; he wore "a scarlet waistcoat with gold lace and a gold-laced hat". The Prologue "soothed the audience, and the play went off tolerably, till it came to the conclusion". The conclusion in question was Irene's onstage strangulation, which upset the audience and provoked shouts of "Murder!". The actress quickly left the stage, and for all the succeeding performances Garrick restored Johnson's original ending.

Cast

Hannah Pritchard played the role of Irene and Garrick cast himself in the role of Demetrius. Other notable actors in the play's original cast were Susannah Maria Arne (using her professional name "Mrs. Cibber") as Aspasia and Spranger Barry as Mahomet.

The complete cast list, according to the first edition, is as follows:

• Mahoment, Emperor of the Turks - Mr. Barry
• Cali Bassa, First Visier - Mr. Berry
• Mustapha, A Turkish Aga - Mr. Sowden
• Abdalla, An Officer - Mr. Harvard
• Hasan, Turkish Captain - Mr. Usher
• Caraza, Turkish Captain - Mr. Burton
• Demetrius, Greek Nobleman - Mr. Garrick
• Leontius, Greek Nobleman - Mr. Blakes
• Murza, An Eunuch - unlisted
• Aspasia, Greek Lady - Mrs. Cibber
• Irene, Greek Lady, Mrs. Pritchard
• Attendants on Irene - unlisted

Critical response

Irene has never been the most admired of Johnson's works. Even James Boswell found it wanting:

Analysed into parts, it will furnish a rich store of noble sentiments, fine imagery, and beautiful language; but it is deficient in pathos, in that delicate power of touching the human feelings, which is the principle end of the drama. Indeed Garrick has complained to me, that Johnson not only had not the faculty of producing the impressions of tragedy, but that he had not the sensibility to perceive them.

Johnson's friend Bennet Langton recorded the author's own later disenchantment with the piece:

At another time, when one was reading his tragedy Irene to a company at a house in the country, he left the room; and somebody having asked him the reason of this, he replied, "Sir, I thought it had been better."'

The early 20th century consensus of opinion was summed up by George Sampson in 1941: "Of his early tragedy Irene it is enough to say that its moral dialogues, its correctness of plan and its smoothness of verse do not suffice to give it any rank as drama." T.S. Eliot suggested an explanation for the play's unpopularity and neglect:

His verse has none of the dramatic qualities; it is correct, but correctness in such isolation becomes itself a fault. The play would be more readable to-day, if he had written it in rhyme; the whole would be more easily declaimed, and the good things more easily remembered; it would lose none of its excellence of structure, thought, vocabulary and figures of speech. What would be mellifluous in rhyme, is merely monotonous without it.

Walter Jackson Bate described the problems with the work:

There is probably no lengthy work (as distinct from mere trifles, or obvious hack work) by any writer of Johnson's standing that has aroused less curiousity, once it is looked into, or provided less enjoyment than Irene. If it were not by Johnson, few people, even people with a close interest in literature, would have heard of it during the last two centuries. It would be given a few sentences in the more detailed histories of eighteenth-century drama, along with scores of other plays that the literary historian tries to rescue from oblivion. Yet paradoxically much of the hindrance to the modern reader is the knowledge that Johnson wrote it. If it were picked up at random - particularly after sampling some other tragedies of his type written at that time - it would not seem too bad. But approaching it with the knowledge that it is by one of the masters of English prose style (who also had a powerful command of one kind of poetic style), and it is also by one of the supreme critics of literature in whatever language, the heart begins after a while to sink except in the most resolute Johnsonian, and sometimes even then.

Notes

1. Bouler, Steven (4/23/2008). "Information & Biography". Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |1= and |coauthors= (help)
2. ^ Bate 1977, p. 156
3. ^ Bate 1977, p. 264
4. Bate 1977, p. 163
5. Johnson 1964, p. 156
6. ^ Bate 1977, p. 265
7. Johnson 1964, p. 110
8. Johnson 1964, p. 109
9. Johnson 1964, p. 150
10. Johnson 1964, p. 166
11. {[Harvnb|Johnson|1964|pp=213-214}}
12. Bate 1977, p. 158
13. Johnson 1964, p. 111
14. Boswell 1980, p. 142
15. Boswell 1980, p. 1068
16. Sampson 1941, p. 527
17. Eliot 1957, p. 175
18. Bate 1977, pp. 157–158

References

• Bate, Walter Jackson (1977), Samuel Johnson, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN 0151792607.
• Boswell, James (1980), Life of Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0192835319
• Eliot, T.S. (1957), On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber & Faber, ISBN 0571089836
• Johnson, Samuel (1964), Poems, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, New Haven: Yale University Press
• Sampson, George (1941), Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

• Poetry by Samuel Johnson
• 1749 plays
• 1749 poems