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Irene or Mahomet and 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, there would be no 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, Tetty,which provoked David Garrick, his student, to perform a skit mocking the incidents, although the incidents he portrayed were more than likely fabrications by Garrick. However, the play was written mostly for Tetty and she was fond of the play and hoped it would be a success. It was her fondness for the play that inspired Johnson to finish the play and motivated him to have it performed.
When Edial failed, Johnson travelled to London and brought the unfinished manuscript with him. He spent years trying to finish the work, and could not fully move onto another until he finished Irene. However, in 1737 he put finishing the play off and turned from it completely in order to work on other projects. When he finally finished the work, he attempted to persuade theatre managers to read it without success, much to Johnson's and Tetty's disappointment. 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 pounds for the performances. On 16 February 1749, the script was published by Robert Dodsley and Johnson was paid an addition 100 pounds.
Play
Irene was based on Richard Knolles's General History of the Turks (1603). 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 ignores his duties as sultan while pursuing her romantically. Soon after, his people begin to riot because the kingdom is falling apart from neglect, and Mahomet kills Irene to prove his dedication to his people. Johnson alters the story to emphasis the idea of temptation: Irene is given the choice of becoming Muslim in return for having her life preserved and be given power within Mahomet's court.
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.
Irene opened 6 February 1749. Tetty Johnson was unable to see the performance because of her illness. Johnson arrived to the performance in what he considered was 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
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 Hannah Pritchard as Irene.
The complete casting, 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
Walter Jackson Bate described the problems with the work as:
"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
- 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) - ^ Bate 1977, p. 156
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 264
- Bate 1977, p. 163
- Bate 1977, p. 168
- Bate 1977, p. 169
- Johnson 1964, p. 156
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 265
- ^ Bate 1977, p. 157
- Bate 1977, p. 158
- Johnson 1964, p. 111
- 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
- Johnson, Samuel (1964), Poems, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, New Haven: Yale University Press