Remains: Performance at the Edge of Empire

Abstract

So wrote the Irish American poet John Montague of the great loss of culture under Great Britain's empire, a violent overmapping of identity whose poignant erasure was itself richly preserved in plays, poems, and songs. Nothing of Ireland's past, it seems, was remembered quite so vigorously as its erasure. And because that disappearance has become such a familiar text of loss, in poem, play, and song, I want to evoke that archive of absence for this study of a similar erasure, centuries earlier—not the Irish under English of Brian Friel's Translations, but the Gallic Celts under Rome; not The Dying Gaul whose images of self-slaughter ennobled their extirpation, but those who survived the conquest, the surrendered, widows and children of the slaughtered who grew that grafted tongue, the twice-born who learned to live again as refugees under Roman rule, and adopt foreign ways—to tease out what little remains there are of the theatre's role in that erasure, resistance, and that monumental realignment of identity called “Romanizing.”