Robert Owenson’s macaronic song repertoire and the Dublin theatre audience of the late eighteenth century

Abstract

This article argues that Robert Owenson’s bilingual song repertoire represents an urban strain of the Irish macaronic tradition which developed over the course of the eighteenth century as Irish-speaking poets and song composers responded to a public that was increasingly diglossic. In Owenson’s case, this repertoire was formed from the crossings between songs and tunes from the Irish-speaking area where this performer grew up, and those that came out of the playhouses, taverns, and streets of Dublin, the city where he spent his twenty-year Irish stage career. The article also explores the politics of these songs and the Dublin audience’s shifting response to their performance. While Owenson’s songs were enthusiastically received in the years leading up to 1782, a period dominated politically by the patriots and the Volunteers, they provoked a reactionary backlash in the later 1780s and 1790s when Dublin’s radical element began claiming them as their own.