Edward Martyn was an Irish playwright and politician. He was the first president of Sinn Féin from 1905 to 1908.
Background
Edward Martyn was born on January 30, 1859, in the county of Galway, in Ireland, to wealthy Catholic landowners John Martyn and Annie Josephine Martyn.
His father’s side of the family is a long line of aristocrats dating back to the reign of Henry II and descended from the Norman invaders under Strongbow. The devoutly Catholic family was exempt from the Penal Laws, which would have confiscated their estates, by an Act during Queen Anne’s reign.
His father passed away in 1860, and his mother raised him for a while in Tulira, the family’s ancestral Gothic mansion on the family’s estate. They moved to Dublin but, in 1870, his family, eventually, settled in London.
Education
Martyn briefly attended Belvedere College, in Dublin. When in London, he enrolled at Beaumont College, a prominent Jesuit school (the school closed in 1967). He remained there for seven years and then continued his education at Christ’s Church, Oxford. He left, however, without a degree.
Career
Martyn returned to Tulira in the 1880s, taking over the management of family business matters and developed the somewhat mutually exclusive ideas of aestheticism and asceticism, enjoying the sophisticated pleasures of the social world, while also submitting to Catholic ecclesiastical influence. He soon became involved in the revival of Irish culture. In 1899, fueled by a desire to advance Irish drama, he started the Irish Literary Theater with Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats, who were all neighbors in Galway. Martyn funded the initial costs of the project and coined the theater’s name. When play rehearsals in London went poorly, they called upon Martyn’s cousin George Moore, who had experience with J. T. Grein’s Independent Theater, to provide technical support.
On May 8, 1899, the theater opened with Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleen. The following night, Martyn’s Heather Field premiered, and it gained more immediate popularity that Yeats’s play. The play was well received by Dublin critics, but reviewers abroad were not as impressed. The following year, Martyn’s two-act play Maeve opened the theater’s second season on February 19 at Dublin’s Gaiety Theater.
Though Martyn’s Ibsenite drama offered an alternative to Yeats’s “peasant drama” and Celtic Twilight romanticism, his work remained underdeveloped and his playwriting career disintegrated, never again reaching the critical acclaim of The Heather Field. The Irish Literary Theater only survived for three years, and when Yeats and Lady Gregory formed the Abbey Theater out of the old theater, they did not invite Martyn to join.
His departure from the theatrical scene was exacerbated by both the poor reception of The Tale of the Town and his philosophical differences with Yeats, who firmly believed in the peasant play as the best vehicle for advancing Irish drama, and consequently, cultural independence from the continent. In 1906, he assisted in the organization of the Theater of Ireland.
In 1914, Martyn started the Irish Theater with Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh. They presented continental masterpieces in translation as well as non-peasant Irish plays. The theater lasted until early 1920. He succumbed to failing health in his final years, and died on December 5, 1923, at Tulira, the last of a long family line.
Religion
Martyn was a devout Catholic.
Politics
Edward Martyn was the first president of Sinn Féin from 1905 to 1908. In 1908 he resigned from the party and politics in general to concentrate on writing and his other activities. He became close friends with Griffith, funding the publication of the latter's The Resurrection of Hungary in 1904. He supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
Views
Passionately devoted to the cultural life of Ireland, Martyn was a staunch supporter of Irish education and music, endeavored to elevate the quality of Irish ecclesiastical art, and was keenly interested in the revival of the Irish language.
Martyn was a man of contradictions. He respected the formal structure of church music and religious art, but endeavored to compose dramatic works that investigated deep psychological anxiety. Martyn was an ardent supporter of the Gaelic League, which promoted the use of the Irish language.
Membership
Martyn was a member of the Kildare Street Gentleman's Club. In 1906 he was at the centre of a well-publicised court case over an off-the-cuff remark that any Irishman who joined the British Army should be flogged. This led to his suspension by the Club. The court case was resolved in his favour. Martyn stated that he only pursued the case to continue membership as it served the best caviar in Dublin.
Personality
Martyn was on close personal terms with Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Mary Plunkett and Patrick Pearse, and deeply mourned their executions in the aftermath of the Easter Rising.
Quotes from others about the person
“Edward Martyn is like Ireland, the country he came from; sometimes a muddling fog; sometimes a delicious mist with a ray of light striking through.” - George Moore
"Martyn always has stood in the shadow of flamboyant, successful contemporaries such as Yeats, Moore, and Lady Gregory.” - Feeney
“Martyn's plays, like his life, show a mass of conflicting tendencies. The action is static, the endings melodramatic, the dialogue stilted, the characters too often stereotypes of his personal obsessions and prejudices. Yet for all his shortcomings, Martyn showed the possibilities of a new kind of drama, a drama both Irish and cosmopolitan which was never fully understood by Yeats. He had he remained as a leading light, his influence might have acted as a valuable corrective to the prevalent doctrine of folk drama and enlarged the whole scope of Irish theatre.” - Hunt