The Lessons of Easter Week, 1916

One cannot spend any time in Dublin, certainly not on the kind of Study Abroad trip from which I have just returned, without being reminded of the Easter Rising of 1916. It gets discussed extensively on the Historical Walking Tour and at Kilmainham Gaol. The train stations—Heuston, Connolly, Pearse—are named after leaders of the rebellion. Bullet holes from the conflict are still visible in the columns in front of the General Post Office. The W.B. Yeats exhibit at the National Library shows what the city looked like after an English battleship had shelled O’Connell Street that week. The only full statue in the city to a specific woman known to have actually existed (as opposed to Queen Maeve or Molly Malone) is dedicated to the Countess Constance Markievicz, whose sex alone prevented her from being executed in the Rising’s aftermath. There are Easter Week-specific tours of the city. And on and on.

Of course, the Easter Rising ultimately failed. There was no lasting Irish Republic established that week, and everyday Irish men and women were lukewarm at best towards the insurrection. But the rhetoric of Pádraig Pearse at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa less than a year earlier proved prophetic: 

Life springs from death: and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! — they have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

Pearse and fourteen others faced firing squads at Dublin's Kilmainham Gaol after the Rising, and three others were either executed outside Dublin or died on a hunger strike in prison, but it was only a few years later that there really was an Irish Free State. Significantly, however, neither the establishment of the Free State nor even the declaration of the Republic (as distinct from a dominion) of Ireland hold anything close to the hold on the public imagination as do the events of Easter 1916.

W.B. Yeats was to write in one of his most famous poems,” Easter, 1916,” written five years after the events he describes, “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” But there’s a sense in which Yeats had it wrong: it wasn’t so much Easter Week itself which was transformative, although those events are certainly not to be ignored. Rather, it was the tone-deaf over-reaction of the English authorities to what had transpired that inexorably changed public opinion. Whereas early on the general populace blamed the Republicans for catalyzing the destruction perpetrated by the British, that attitude dissipated in the wake of the ongoing series of executions. It seemed a little barbaric that the English provided emergency medical assistance to James Connolly so he wouldn't die before they had a chance to kill him. Moreover, the killings or long-term internments of a number of nationalists who had little if any connection to the Rising suggested that the British authorities were more interested in a show of force than in justice.

Not included in the list of those executed, for example, were Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist who was outspoken in his opposition to the tactics (though not the goals) of the rebels, and two pro-British journalists, Thomas Dixon and Patrick McIntyre. Still, all three were arrested, unarmed and unresisting, and ultimately shot to death by British soldiers. It didn’t help that the officer in charge, although indeed arrested for murder, was able to successfully plead insanity (battle fatigue), and ultimately retired at 40 with a full pension. England also extended martial law long after there was any real unrest in Ireland.

As a result of all this, the Irish people in general became considerably more radicalized, more impatient, more willing to employ violence rather than more peaceable means to achieve their ends. The moderate Irish Parliamentary Party, which held 68 parliamentary seats at the time of the Rising, managed to retain only seven in the December 1918 by-election. By contrast, Sinn Féin, which had held only six seats in the spring of 1916, re-organized under Éamon de Valera (who escaped execution after the Rising only because he was American-born) and promised to employ “every means available to render impotent the power of England to hold Ireland in subjection.” Although as an organization Sinn Féin had not been directly involved in the Rising, a good number of its members had been, and they had the best name recognition among the nationalist groups. The result was an over 12-fold increase in their parliamentary representation after the 1918 elections: to 73 seats.

We could tease out some of the nuances and discuss Sinn Féin’s subsequent tactics, but this isn’t a history lesson; it’s a political blog. So what is the real point of recounting history of nearly a century ago? Simply this: there was a lesson to be learned here. To repeat: the Irish people weren’t on the side of the radicals until the English arrogantly over-reacted. I can find literally no one, from Irish historians to the BBC, who disagrees with this assessment. Yet these simple lessons—even people who disagree with you will respect you if you act justly, and moderates will become extremists if you don’t—seem to have been particularly difficult for the politically and militarily powerful to learn. The English couldn’t wrap their heads around it in the wake of Bloody Sunday, taking some 38 years to finally, a little over a fortnight ago, admit that the victims (13 dead, as many more seriously injured) of those horrible events in Derry in 1972, had done nothing to deserve their fate. The IRA certainly got a lot of recruits from those who had seen what happened to peaceful protesters.

This kind of obliviousness, however, is not a peculiarly English phenomenon. We Americans have gotten very good at it, especially recently. With few exceptions, world opinion was overwhelmingly sympathetic to this country after the events of September 11, 2001. Then came the invasion of Iraq, a country which had precisely bupkis to do with 9/11. Then there was Abu Ghraib. And Guantanamo. And waterboarding. More importantly, there were the obviously disingenuous denials. And, suddening, a good share of the Islamic world, people who had been neutral towards the US or even leaning a little towards friendship, started viewing American foreign policy—Bush’s, Obama’s, it doesn’t matter—in Western Asia as arrogant, imperialistic, and unjust… and not without reason.

Now comes a report that the Fourth Estate, once charged with a primary role in speaking truth to power, has been abrogating that responsibility: the following is from the abstract of a study by Harvard students:

“From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.”

That I have no use for cowardly journalism is hardly a news flash; that it appears that many elite media institutions have completely caved on any kind of pursuit of objective reality falls under that ever-widening category of “I hate it when I’m right.” Anything the lunatic right challenges, no matter how frivolous the protestations, becomes “controversial,” and that means shying away from accurate terms in favor of euphemisms. The defenders of the duly constituted Iraqi government became “insurgents”; the civil war there couldn’t be called a civil war; prisoners of war would be subject to the Geneva Conventions, so those folks became “captured enemy combatants”; waterboarding, which had been a classic example of torture for generations, was now simply an “enhanced interrogation technique.” If this is what we get from the so-called left-wing media, then what hope have we?

More to the point, everyone smarter than Liz Cheney, and that’s damned near everybody, knows that this is all a steaming pile of bullshit. And, as Watergate taught us, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. Denying the facts was hard enough a generation ago; in the internet age, it’s a virtual impossibility, although there are plenty of folks, especially but by no means exclusively on the political right, who are willing to give it a try.

Maybe, however, we should learn the lessons of the Easter Rising and its aftermath: that making martyrs of those willing to be martyred is seldom a good idea; that avoiding responsibility can last only so long; that people are ultimately smart enough not to be distracted by legalistic niceties, especially when those lawyerly phrases ring immediately hollow to any reasonably intelligent 12-year-old. If what we want to do is to “win the hearts and minds” of the Islamic world, we need to change course in a big old hurry. If we want to continue to be the world’s greatest recruiter of al-Qaida operatives, we need only proceed down the path we’re on. After all, it worked so well for the British in 1916.

I like artists more than bean-counters. Go figure.

I’ve been thinking a lot about copyright of late, especially as it applies to people other than the ones who actually created something.

I’m doing my own translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias for next year for a slightly different reason than I adapted Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck for this year. In the latter case, I wanted to look at the structure of the play, especially given the manifold possibilities for ordering of scenes, etc. A new version seemed a logical approach, and gave me the opportunity to work with the student dramaturg and assistant director in what I hope was a unique experience for them. For Breasts, however, I think the standard translation in the Benedikt/Wellwarth Modern French Theatre anthology is just fine, but tracking down the rights to that translation is likely to be as difficult as doing my own. Plus, not only can I now say exactly what I think Apollinaire is up to, there’s no royalty to be paid, as he has been dead longer than the requisite 70 years. (We’d still have to pay a royalty on the translation if I didn’t use my own.)

The other day I happened to be wearing the show t-shirt from my production of Six Characters in Search of an Author a few years ago. Here’s a link to: the image we used for the show logo. One of my current students asked about it. I won’t go into the whole story here, but here’s the essence: the painting is by a very well-established artist named George Underwood. How well-established? Well, one indication is that he designed the album covers for David Bowie’s “The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust,” Procol Harum’s “Shine On Brightly” and Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes,” and the inner sleeve for T. Rex’s “Electric Warrior.” (Trust me, younger readers, that’s a big deal.)

Anyway, I really liked the image, and I was able to convince the powers-that-be to at least check out how much it would cost to get the rights to use the painting, “Boccioni,” in our publicity. So our director of arts information e-mailed him, and within 24 hours she’d received a reply: it would cost us one copy of the poster, one copy of the program, and one show t-shirt. We quickly asked the most important question: what size t-shirt? This is a man who doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone, and he was flattered that a theatre department at a school I’m sure he’s never heard of liked his work enough to use it. As a result, his work was seen by hundreds of people who might not have seen it otherwise: or at least who wouldn’t have known who the artist was. We also made sure to plug his website every chance we got, even though we weren’t required to do so. Maybe somebody with the money to do so buys something there. Everybody wins.

Of course, intellectual property isn’t the only way artists help out those with a legitimate interest. When I was writing my doctoral dissertation, for example, every playwright but one (plus a director and two scholars) whom I asked for an interview not only obliged, but re-arranged their schedules as necessary to accommodate my whirlwind research trip to Dublin (with a quick side trip to Oxford). Two of them bought me a pint; one made coffee in his rooms. The sole exception was Seamus Heaney, who had already won the Nobel Prize, and quite justifiably didn’t grant interviews to mere grad students.

I mentioned scholars… the same trends apply to them. When I was writing my dissertation my university invited a major scholar—someone whose name would be recognized by anyone in my business, regardless of specialization—to campus for a series of seminars. I somewhat hesitantly asked him if he might spare a few minutes to talk about a point of intersection between his research and mine. “Of course,” he said, and proceeded to sit down with me for over an hour and a half.

I was asked to teach an acting course a few years ago, and the (award-winning) book I had hoped to use as the primary textbook had gone out of print. While I could, and did, substitute another book, there was one chapter I really didn’t want to lose. So I e-mailed the author to see if I could get permission to photocopy those few pages. His response, paraphrased: “The book is out of print and will apparently stay that way. Photocopy whatever you want; I’m just glad you like it enough to use it.”

Ah, but the people I’ve been describing: they’re the artists, and scholars, and people who create things themselves. Artists’ agents, estates, etc.: another matter. A couple of years after Six Characters, I directed As You Like It and I wanted to use this painting by Maxfield Parrish for our logo. So we dutifully contacted the agent for the estate (Parrish died in 1966)… and they wanted $1500. I suggested that they perform an activity for which both physical dexterity and hermaphroditic tendencies would contribute to the success of the exercise. As it happens, I know something about the condition of the Parrish estate—his hometown is only a few miles from the family homestead—and the $250 or $300 we could have afforded and would willingly have paid would have helped them out a fair amount. I even thought about bypassing the agent and talking to the estate directly, but deadlines loomed and I wasn’t able to pursue that avenue. The result was that everyone lost: the Parrish estate got nothing instead of something, a great artist’s work wasn’t circulated the way it might have been, and, although I was happy with our ultimate logo, we didn’t get to use an image that actually inspired a lot of the concept and the look of the production.

So… now I’m in correspondence with a woman at Music Theatre International. One of my colleagues is directing the classic musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in the fall. For several years our program has assigned students in the non-major Theatre Appreciation class to read the plays they will see as a course requirement. Whether or not this is good pedagogy, the practice has always worked well logistically. Musicals are likely to be harder to work with in this respect (scripts have traditionally been rented instead of sold—don’t ask me why), but of the four musicals in the time we’ve had this policy, three of the libretti were available directly in published versions, and the other had been included in an anthology, so we were able to secure rights to “publish” it in a coursepack.

But How to Succeed has, as far as I can figure out, never been published in the traditional sense of that term. That complicates things considerably, because for whatever reason MTI seems really interested in keeping these scripts out of the hands of the public. And, of course, we can’t go to the artists themselves: lyricist Frank Loesser died in 1969; the book is by Abe Burrows (d. 1985), Jack Weinstock (d. 1969) and Willie Gilbert (d. 1980), based on a book by Shepherd Mead (d. 1994). All we want to do is have a bunch of people who don’t necessarily know a lot about theatre be able to comprehend what they’re seeing a little better in the hopes that they might ultimately like it more: the course is called Theatre Appreciation, after all. And, of course, we’d pay (or have the students pay) a royalty fee to include the text in a coursepack. But MTI, who must surely have had requests like this in the past, is reluctant. Of course, the fact that I can’t figure out a reasonable rationale for their behavior doesn’t mean they don’t have one. And I understand the need to protect the reputation of the product, but I bet they still grant production rights to Millard Fillmore Junior High in Spider Breath, Montana.

The headline-maker this week about copyright was, once again, about the estate of the person involved, not the person himself. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which (inexplicably to me) controls the rights to Albert Einstein’s name and image, is suing General Motors for over $75,000 for using the great physicist’s face superimposed onto the body of an underwear model in a promotional campaign for the GMC Terrain: “Ideas are sexy too.” Get it? The ad ran precisely once, in the “Sexiest Man Alive” issue of People magazine last September. I personally think GM ought to be sued for having such a stupid ad, but in strictly legal terms it appears the car company may have acted in good faith, believing they had bought the rights from “a reputable agency.” Apparently not. Anyway, HUJ, which apparently doesn’t have problems with the famous tongue-out photograph of Einstein, which appears virtually everywhere, believes the half-Einstein/half-hunk image is “not consummate with and causes injury to” the university’s “carefully guarded rights in the image and likeness of the famous scientist, political activist and humanitarian.” Sure they do. It’s really hard to side with a multi-national corporation against a university, but give me a damned break. They don’t give a crap about Einstein’s reputation, only what they can make out of the deal—and ol’ Al still apparently ranks in the top ten earners among dead celebrities.

And finally, I look forward to being, barely over a fortnight from now, in Ireland, one of the most litigious places on the planet. Early in the course which includes a 16-day trip to the Emerald Isle, we read The Colleen Bawn by Dion Boucicault, a champion of copyright law as well as being one of the premiere playwrights of the mid-19th century; he was also, ironically, one of the greatest plagiarists in history. But when we think of Ireland’s contributions to world culture, we think first of 20th-century writers: four Nobel laureates in literature in barely over 70 years a from a country with a population roughly the size of Houston’s. And what do the likes of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett have in common? [N.B., yes, I know Joyce didn’t win the Nobel Prize: go with me, here.] Well, for one thing, their heirs, many of whom have done little if anything with their lives except bask in the steady income generated by their forebears, are positively hemorrhoidal when it comes to anything to do with rights.

The Beckett estate is notorious for shutting down productions that allow theatre artists to do their jobs (God forbid that the scenic designer be given any authority, or that one of the tramps in Waiting for Godot be played by a woman). But at least our boy Sammy himself was equally persnickety.

W.B. Yeats’s heirs are a little difficult to deal with, too, making the current exhibition at the National Library in Dublin all the more impressive. Yeats’s heirs, for example, have refused to allow publication of the version of The Countess Cathleen that was actually performed as one of the premiere productions of the Irish Literary Theatre. We know exactly what that version said (I’ve actually read the hand-edited script of Florence Farr, who played the supporting role of Aleel: it’s in the O’Hegarty Collection in the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas), but the play was revised both before and after production, and the actual performance script has never been published. (Well, technically it was, sort of, but not in a form any casual reader might find useful or enjoyable.) I was asked several years ago to write the introduction to a collection of Irish Renaissance plays. The editor had a contract with a very reputable publisher; he’d chosen the plays to include, including a couple by Yeats (for which he thought he had arranged for publication rights, and he got (understandably) a little grumpy with me that I didn’t finish my 30-page essay until spring break of 2001 when he had wanted it by February. A couple weeks after receiving my introduction, he e-mailed me to say that he liked what I’d done; he’d made a couple of minor stylistic changes and sent the entire manuscript along to the publisher. It still isn’t out. Guess why.

But the High Exalted Executive Omnipotent Poobah of literary estate jackassery is Stephen Joyce, grandson of James. A few of his many adventures in assholitude are chronicled in a now nearly four-year-old article from the New Yorker: he has granted and then withdrawn copyright permissions to letters, for example, threatening lawsuits like a grumpy old man chasing the kids off his lawn. He has thus left scholars with the choice of leaving out entire sections of their work or going ahead without the supporting documentation, making their work seem speculative when in fact it isn’t. Both results are detailed in that rather lengthy article, which, Gentle Reader, you needn’t read in its entirety. He has threatened lawsuits against anyone holding free Bloomsday readings of Ulysses, as if he weren’t going to make pots of money off people buying books because they heard enough to pique their interest. He has whinged that an actor who memorized lengthy portions of Ulysses had probably already violated copyright. Really. He is apparently quite proud of his constipation: “What other literary estate stands up the way I do? It’s a whole way of looking at things and looking at life.” It certainly is. Dubliners’ slang term for the statue of James Joyce leaning jauntily against his cane just off O’Connell Street is “the prick with the stick.” Stephen, apparently, doesn’t use a cane.

So, as I prepare for a third Bloomsday in Dublin, I note with a wry pleasure that next time, 2012, will be over 70 years after James Joyce’s death in 1941. Next year will also mark the figurative demise of Stephen as a major force in Joyceana, although presumably he will still control access to letters and papers which are literally in his possession—he claims to have destroyed some, and threatens to do so to others.

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story. When They Make Me Tsar, work will enter the public domain faster, but my Tsar-ship still seems well into the future. In the present, we play by the rules. People, even business-people, are allowed to do things that aren’t necessarily in their own best interest. Exercising one’s legal rights is, after all, doing precisely that: doing what one has an explicit legal right to do. But the reason I would never succeed in either business or law is that there’s a difference between being a curmudgeon and just being an ass. At least I hope so. Give me the artist ten times out of ten.