Abstract

'In tracing the progress of society,' observed Joseph Cooper Walker in 1788, we discover the Drama amongst the first amusements of man. It is therefore very extraordinary that we cannot discover any vestiges of the Drama amongst the remains of the Irish Bard'. Walker's Historical Essay on the Irish Stage' stands at the beginning of Irish theatre history as a discipline, a distinction it shares with Robert Hitchcock's History of the Irish Stage. From the beginning, Cooper and Hitchcock define what would become one of Irish theatre's central puzzles: why was there no theatre in pre-conquest Gaelic culture?