[In the following article, Ó Tuama argues that, whereas the prologue and epilogue sections of '"The Midnight Court" are based on the Anglo-French Court of Love tradition, the monologues that form the body of the poem come from the late-medieval tradition of popular Irish folk poetry. Ó Tuama then proceeds to connect the poem's examination of illegitimacy with the presumed illegitimacy of Merriman.]

The emergence of an uniquely talented poet such as Brian Merriman in County Clare in the second half of the eighteenth century was in many ways an unlikely event. The renowned Irish literary figures of the previous century and a half had without exception come from counties east of the Shannon, and given what we know of the Clare literary tradition one would not have held out great hopes for a remarkable work of literature to emerge there in the last decades of the eighteenth century. There had been of course a good deal of traditional poetic and learned activity in County Clare right down through the eighteenth and into the first half of the nineteenth century, but the quality of the verse composed by even early eighteenth-century Clare poets was generally pedestrian.

What we know about the author of the Court is very little indeed, and in some ways only helps to deepen the mystery about the provenance of the poem. He was born somewhere in County Clare (probably in Ennistymon) about 1749. It is generally accepted that he was of illegitimate birth—indeed the untraditional Irish name of Merriman may indicate that. It would appear that his mother married a travelling mason who reared Brian as his own son. Afterwards the family settled down in Feakle where Brian later taught school and cultivated a small farm assiduously (winning two prizes for his flax crops in 1797). In the year 1787 he married, had two daughters, transferred to Limerick city in 1802-3, where he continued to teach until he died suddenly in July 1805. Unusually for an Irish poet of the time, his death was noted in the local newspaper. He was referred to however, not as a poet but as a teacher of "Mathematics, etc."

This general picture gives us no clear idea of the personality or thinking of Brian Merriman. We do not know what education he had, literary or otherwise. The two minor lyrics ascribed to him, apart from the Court, show no sign of special literary talent. He does not seem to have communicated with other poets, or joined with them in their courts of poetry. Indeed in a wry comment in The Midnight Court he seems to refer to himself not as one who is a familiar of the poets but as one who is a familiar of the privileged genty of the county.

The Midnight Court is undoubtedly one of the greatest comic works of literature, and certainly the greatest comic poem ever written in Ireland. Scores of copies of the original manuscript were made in the immediate years after its composition: it was read with avidity, discussed and frequently added to. But we know of no other Gaelic work similar to Merriman's poem in its overall structure.

The Midnight Court is, in fact, a Court of Love in the typical medieval West European mould. Literary parliaments, assemblies and courts were very much in vogue in western Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.¹ One finds courts of love in Provencal, French and Latin as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Later one comes on them in German, Italian and English. In English the genre is found in abundance from the time of Chaucer right down to Elizabethan times. Swift's Cadenus and Vanessa is one of the last to be written in English.

In Merriman's court illegitimates are extolled, free love and the marriage of the Catholic clergy are advocated. Because of such ideas the poem has been looked on in the past as a work of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, owing its inspiration to authors such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Swift. This view would scarcely be acceptable nowadays. Indeed it has been pointed out² that much of the thematic material in The Midnight Court is found already in that bawdy part of the courtly thirteenth century Roman de la Rose which was added on to the original by Jean de Meung. The Roman, which in itself contains the influences of the court of love convention, was the literary Bible of the Middle Ages; it was translated into other languages, and referred to incessantly in love-literature down to the end of the sixteenth century. It is extremely doubtful, however, if Brian Merriman would have read any part of the Roman de la Rose in either French or English. How then did a teacher of Mathematics in Feakle, County Clare in the year 1780 become familiar with the medieval court of love conventions and manage to encapsulate in his poem the spirit of Jean de Meung, the man who (as Helen Waddell puts it) "laid his not overclean hands upon the Rose"?

In attempting to find an answer to this problem one has to take into account that both the court of love conventions, and some of the basic thematic material used by Jean de Meung were common currency in various literary forms and works for some time before and for long centuries after the composition of the Roman, and could have been available to Brian Merriman in a variety of ways. His debt to the general European tradition is best understood by looking at the overall shape of the poem, and noting its affiliations with various medieval literary forms.

The Midnight Court may be said to consist formally of a Prologue, three dramatic monologues, and an Epilogue. In the Prologue Brian Merriman tells us first of all of a typical court poet's summer morning's vision:

By the brink of the river I'd often walk,
on a meadow fresh, in the heavy dew,
along the woods, in the mountain's heart,
happy and brisk in the brightening dawn.
My heart would lighten to see Loch Gréine,
the land, the view, the sky horizon,
the sweet and delightful set of the mountains
looming their heads up over each other.

Later a woman appears and leads the poet to a splendid court where the fairy-goddess of Thomond, Aoibheall, supported by an assembly of women, is presiding over a love-debate. Elements of the literary apparatus of the Prologue are found at random throughout medieval courts of love. The love-debate is common to all. The splendid court is frequent. The summer morning's vision in a nature setting appears in the Roman de la Rose, and in a host of other poems. The assembly of women—sometimes presided over by the goddess Venus—is a theme in several poems. (One of the earliest courts, the Latin Council of Remiremont from the twelfth century, was in fact an assembly of nuns.) Of special interest perhaps is the vision-woman who leads the poet to the place of assembly. W. A. Neilson tells us that "the business of the cicerone in medieval allegory, especially in France, is usually given to a maiden."³ He then goes on to discuss some medieval instances in which such a woman takes on the appearance of an old woman or hag. 'Hag' is a mild description of the woman who appears in Merriman's opus:

a frightful, fierce, fat, full-bummed female,
thick-calved, bristling, bony and harsh,
her height exact—if I guessed it right—
six yards or seven, with something over.

The matter to be debated at court is why young men (like Merriman himself) were not getting married, thus leaving the women dissatisfied, and the country's population declining. The first person to take the witness stand is a young girl who in a long dramatic monologue complains of the lack of a husband. The young girl's Complaincte is a standard medieval popular form. There are examples of it to be found in traditional Irish literature which may have been composed before Merriman's time. Merriman's girl, however, makes her complaint very much in the extended burlesque tradition of the late sixteenth-century English or French ballad—and at the same time she speaks right out of the heart of the Irish eighteenth-century scene:

I'm certainly always on display
at every field where the game's fought hard,
at dances, hurling, races, courting,
bone-fires, gossip and dissipation,
at fairs and markets and Sunday Mass—
to see and be seen, and choose a man. . . .
I never would settle me down to sleep
without fruit in a sock beneath my ear;
I found it no trouble to fast devoutly
—a whole day I'd swallow no bite or sup:
I'd rinse my shift against the stream
for a whisper in dream from my future spouse. . . .
But the point and purpose of my tale
Is I've done my best and I've still no man—
hence, alas, my long recital!
In the knot of years I am tangled tight,
I am heading hard for my days of grey
and I fear that I'll die without anyone asking. . . .

The second dramatic monologue is an old man's retort who points out to the court that the young girl's own poverty-stricken life and promiscuous habits are the cause of her trouble:

It's a terrible scandal and show for the people
that a wretch like yourself, without cattle or sheep,
should have shoes with a buckle, a silken cloak
and a pocket hanky a-flap on the breeze!

The old man goes on to tell how he himself was deceived in marriage—a theme which got an airing in the Roman de la Rose, in a few courts of love, and in many other medieval literary works:

My total loss that I failed to choke
on the night I was christened!—or before I lusted
to bed with that woman who turned me grey
and drove me wild, without friend or wits.
Everyone old and young could tell me
how game she was in the country pubs
to drink and buy, as they beat the tables,
and relax on her back for married or single.

In gruesome fact, she gave me a son
(no sinew of mine) before its time:
I'd a fireside family after one night!

There is an English ballad of the seventeenth century, The Lass of Lynn's new joy for finding a father for her child, which tells of a situation very reminiscent of the old man's plight.

In support of his plea that love should be free and marriage abolished the old man finally embarks on a paean in praise of bastards. The message of free love was of course the principal message preached in the second part of Roman de la Rose, but the praise of bastards seems to surface principally in Elizabethan times in England. Shakespeare's famous passage in King Lear is a case in point. One contemporary of Shakespeare's had this to say: "It is so little feared that unless one hath had two or three bastardes a peece, they esteeme no man."⁴

An eighteenth-century poem by Richard Savage, The Bastard, published in Dublin in 1728, may have been a part of Merriman's reading; but the tone of Merriman's plea is very much the tone of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English ballads:

The dull offspring of the marriage bed
What is it but a human piece of lead?
a sottish lump, ingendered of all ills
Begot like cats, against their father's wills!

Those of illegitimate birth, however, are thought to be of more sterling quality:

Hence spring the noble, fortunate and great
Always begot in passion and in heat.

This last line is echoed closely in Merriman's resounding couplet:

. . . crobhaire crothadh go cothrom gan cháim éLe fonn na fola is le fothram na sláinte

—lit., 'he is a stalwart fully-fashioned without blemish/in the heat of the blood and the resonance of health.'

In the third monologue the young woman gives a harrowing commentary on the old man's performance as a husband to the young woman he married. The material here is typical of the bawdy medieval song type called chanson de la malmariée, which appears frequently in French, Italian, Scottish and indeed Irish popular literature. A Clare poet, Seá n Ó hUaithnín, who preceded Brian Merriman by almost fifty years, had written such a song, but Merriman's extension of the theme leaves all his predecessors in the shade:

It was gloomy doings, the nightly joy
—oppression and burden, trouble and fright:
legs of lead, and skinny shoulders,
iron knees as cold as ice,
shrunken feet by embers scorched,
an old man's ailing, wasting body. . . .
She'd never complain at a night of work
but give a brave slasher as good as she got.
She'd never refuse any time or place
on bone of her back with her eyes shut tight,
with never a balk or immoderate sulk
nor attack like a cat, nor scrape nor scratch,
but stretched her all like a sheaf beside him
flank on flank, with her legs around him,
coaxing his thoughts by easy stages,
fingering down on him, mouth on mouth,
putting her leg the far side of him often
rubbing her brush from waist to knee,
or snatching the blanket and quilt from his loins
to fiddle and play with the juiceless lump.
But useless to tickle or squeeze or rub
or attack with her elbows, nails or heels
—I'm ashamed to relate how she passed the night
squeezing the sluggard, shuddering, sprawling,
tossing her limbs and the bedding beneath her,
her teeth and her members all a-shiver,
not sleeping a wink till the dawn of day,
performing and tossing from side to side.

The young woman proceeds after this to plead that vigorous young men—and well-fed priests in particular—should be drafted into marriage. The advocacy of marriage for priests is somewhat unheralded in the poem, and is, perhaps, a little surprising. A similar theme, however, is to be found in a few medieval courts of love. In the Council of Remiremont the love of a clergyman was deemed much more satisfying than the love of a clerk, and any nun not acting according to this dictum was ordered to be promptly ex-communicated. Similarly a twelfth-century Court called Clerus et Presbyter—attended only by clergymen—decided that priests should have concubines:

Habebimus, clerici, duas concubinas
Si tandem leges implebimus divinas.

They looked to the Pope to free them from the dire rules of chastity, as indeed does the President of our Midnight Court in its concluding section, the Epilogue.

The typical Court of Love ends with judgment being given and statutes being passed. A French poem, for instance, written by Christine de Pisan in 1399 and translated into English by Thomas Hoccleve, reflects this convention. It is decided here by the God of Love that in order to protect womenfolk all villainous untrustworthy men should be seized, tied, and roughly treated.

In The Midnight Court judgment is similarly passed, decrees proposed, and the date noted. President Aoibheall's judgment, however, is unexpectedly on the conservative side. She would not advocate that the institution of marriage be abandoned, but would allow rather unsatisfactory provisions to enable young people to enjoy as much permissiveness as possible—hoping old people would lend their names to the illegitimate offspring. As for the matter of priests being permitted to marry, she counsels patience in the hope that the Pope "with full assent of a Council" would in time remove the restrictions on marriage for the clergy. The only specific decree she does propose is similar to that proposed in the poem by Christine de Pisan: that all young men of marriageable age such as Merriman himself, who had not taken wives unto themselves, should be seized, tied, and severely punished.

It is reasonably clear, then, whatever of the immediate provenance of The Midnight Court, that it is throughout closely related to medieval and late medieval conventions of thought and literary structure. The Court of Love apparatus is especially apparent in the Prologue and Epilogue. The love debate itself, carried out in the form of three burlesque dramatic monologues which one does not normally associate with a Court of Love, has close affiliations with late medieval popular songs and ballads. Simpler models of one or two of these song types may have existed in Irish folksong for several centuries previous to this, but it is questionable whether the particular burlesque models of these which appear in The Midnight Court had been established in Irish for very long before Merriman's time. It is quite likely indeed that the matter and models that Merriman inherited, and radically transformed in his poem, belong more to the post-Elizabethan era in Ireland.⁶

The Midnight Court, in its conventions and themes, does, of course, emanate ultimately from a west-European literary love-movement which began to make a profound impact on poetry in various languages as early as the twelfth century, and continued to do so, in different waves and guises until a new love poetry appeared in the Renaissance period. In my book An Grá in Amhráin na nDaoine I make the case that Irish folkpoetry was greatly influenced by this medieval movement which began to wield its influence in Ireland in the wake of the Anglo-Norman invasion (1169). My main thesis was that a great many of the types of Irish love-song being sung in our Gaeltachtaí today were to be found in troubadour and trouvère literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This argument has frequently been misinterpreted as meaning that direct French influence on our folksong was unquestionably the dominant one. That is not necessarily so. Certainly, on the evidence available, it seems quite likely that in earlier medieval times (c. 1200-1400) the French influence was greater than that of English; but it seems equally likely that in later periods (after 1400) English influence on both our folk poetry and literary love-poetry began to supplant that of French. Consequently it need not surprise us that many of the elements which constitute the structure of The Midnight Court should have made their way into traditional Irish literature in the post-Elizabethan era. English influence at that period was all pervasive. Indeed eighteenth-century Gaelic poets such as Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, Seá n Ó Tuama, Aindrias Mac Craith could themselves write fluent—though execrable—verses in English. Two poets who lived for a time near Ennis and were contemporaries of Merriman, Seá n Lloyd and Tomás Ó Míocháin, wrote some of their work in English. In fact in the year 1780 Lloyd published in Ennis a small book of prose in English called A Short Tour, or an Impartial and Accurate Description of the County of Clare.

Merriman, who spent most of his life in East Clare—where literary activity in Irish was minimal compared to West Clare—lived in an area and an environment which was much more susceptible to English influence than that of many other parts of Munster. The Irish language was receding rapidly there as it was in the area across the Shannon, North Tipperary, with which it was closely linked. The colonial gentry and the anglicised Irish gentry whom, we presume, Merriman numbered amongst his friends, would have been in constant touch with external commercial and cultural matters, not only in the nearby city of Limerick but in Dublin as well. At the same time it must be remembered that there was probably a high degree of bilinguality at all levels of society at this period in East Clare. Hely Dutton in his Statistical Survey of County Clare could still say of County Clare in general nearly thirty years after the composition of The Midnight Court: "Almost all the better kind of people speak Irish to the country people."

It is not at all easy, however, to envisage how the specific structural and thematic elements of The Midnight Court reached Brian Merriman in his East Clare milieu. The principal difficulty here is that (in terms of English literature) the Court of Love elements, as found in the Prologue and Epilogue, seem to belong to high literary tradition, whereas the monologues seem squarely in the late-medieval popular tradition. Did Brian Merriman then read some solemn English Court of Love and give his own comic Irish version of it, adding in the popular monologues (models for some of which might already have been assimilated into the Irish language by poets who preceded him)? Or did he in fact have as a model an English bawdy court of love containing, perhaps, burlesque elements of a kind already existing in the popular Irish literary tradition? Or, or, or . . . the permutations of the possibilities are endless. But it must be noted that, despite the affiliations between The Midnight Court and the general thematic material of medieval courts of love, there is no single Court of Love we know of, which resembles it in any detail.

The Prologue and Epilogue contain many Court of Love elements, for instance, which are not to be found in Swift's Cadenus and Vanessa—a work which has been suggested in the past as Merriman's model. If Merriman did, in fact, use a bawdy Court of Love in English as a complete or partial model for his Midnight Court it may have been a work such as the 'lost' Court of Venus which disappeared from circulation in England in the second half of the sixteenth century after Puritan Reformers had heaped 'universal opprobrium' on it because of its scandalous nature. There is a great deal of scholarly debate as to what this 'lost' Court of Venus really was,⁷ but assuming it was in the traditional Court of Love form, it could possibly have been the starting point for Merriman's poem. It is not too extravagant to suggest that one of his friends amongst the gentry could have had such in his ancestral family library, or could have picked it up in a bookshop in Dublin or Limerick. All that, however, remains a mere hypothesis. . . .

The Midnight Court can, of course, be read with immense enjoyment and profit by a reader who has no knowledge whatever of its literary background and antecedents. It is a poem of gargantuan energy, moving clearly and pulsatingly along a simple story line, with a middle, a beginning and an end. For a poem of over one thousand lines it has few longueurs. It is full of tumultuous bouts of great good humour, verbal dexterity and rabelaisian ribaldry. It is a mammoth readable achievement with little need of gloss.

The literary critic does need to know, however, what exact conventions or thematic matter Merriman inherited, or grappled with, if he is to throw light on the poet's personal investment in his work. The originality of his new creation cannot be appreciated or put into focus until the nature of the old material is discovered.

It would be a help, then, in discussing Merriman's achievement to know whether he did or did not have an immediate model or models such as the 'lost' Court of Venus. At the same time, anyone who is familiar with the general literary background I have been describing, will be reasonably certain that all medieval themes and conventions as handled by Merriman were changed, transmuted utterly, and that a new demonic comic creation emerged which is absolutely eighteenth-century Irish. It says a great deal for the vigour and richness of the Irish literary tradition that, in a late eighteenth-century bilingual environment, it could still be manipulated so creatively and with such astonishing assimilating force. Material which remains conventional, inert, semi-abstract or solemn in medieval literature—material such as that of the young girl's complaint, the celibacy of the priests, the chanson de la malmariée, the vision-woman or Cicerone, the natural splendour of the illegitimate child—is developed and extended into extraordinary new dimensions. Part of the poet's success here is due to the manner and verve with which he merges significant human detail, contemporary and other, with old themes. For instance, the girl's complaint is full of exact and fascinating references to Irish superstitions and behaviour at the time. Similarly the old man's diatribe against her contains precise observation of County Clare fashions in the second half of the eighteenth century. Again, the old man's description of the poor hovel the girl lived in is both more moving and more immediate than any social historian's—and yet somehow is not at odds with the comic vein of the poem:

The soot dripping wet and the rising damp,
weeds appearing in great profusion
and the signs of hens inscribed across it,
a weakened ridge and bending beams
and a brown downpour descending heavily.

Even the often criticised conventional summer morning opening of the poem has a good deal of human personal observation in it which saves it somewhat from being a tiresome old cliché.

Merriman's success was mainly due of course to his eloquence, his tumultuous, comic eloquence. It is virtually certain for instance that in no medieval text, lost or found, did the matter of clerical celibacy get the kind of virtuoso treatment it gets in The Midnight Court The poet's eloquence could take different shapes as the requirements of the narrative or the dramatic monologues dictated. It is at its most effective when it flies into bawdy or bombast or vituperation; but (at the other end of the scale) it can also be quite effective in creating an animated conversational-type dramatic situation (as in the long section which portrays the gossips around the fireside dealing with the illegitimate child). Irish poetry has traditionally leaned towards the dramatic situational type of lyric structure; the bombastic vituperative vein has also been hugely cultivated. So in mentioning Merriman's stylistic achievements, one is also stressing that as a creative writer he is operating mainly within his own Gaelic literary tradition. The bombast, the adjectival rhetoric, may on occasion overshoot the mark. Generally speaking, however, it is an essential part of the outlandish quality of the poem.

The more one reads The Midnight Court—especially in the light of all the medieval themes and conventions which are found radically transformed in it—the more one is convinced that the poet is speaking of issues which are real to him; that a disturbing eighteenth-century revelation of some kind is taking place, or trying to take place. I have gone on record before this⁸ as saying that the major defect of the poem is that it has no deep personal insights, or even interesting insights to offer on the problems broached (as one would expect in the works of the gifted comic writers from Aristophanes to Beckett). I should like to modify that view somewhat now and say that I feel the major defect of the poem is that the insights and feelings about love and marriage which abound in the poem are not brought to proper artistic definition. Yet behind all the comic alarms and excursions, behind the somewhat ramshackle old-fashioned structure, it must be noted that there is a certain deep sense of conviction and a consistency of feeling.

The leitmotif of the poem at all main stages seems to be that human beings must not allow their basic sexual vigour or instincts to become arid or conventionalised: the human animal must at all costs fulfil himself—whatever the rules or mores of society ordain at any given time. The young girl complains at the outset, for instance, of her own wasted years, and later complains of the wasted years of a woman-friend who was married off to an old man. She also complains of how the rules of obligatory chastity lay waste the manhood of priests. The old man, despite his own experience—or more likely because of it?—appeals for an end to marriage, being an institution which thwarts people (when they have to await the requirements of legal and ecclesiastical ordinances) from propagating "as nature ordains".

The idea of sex as vigour abounds in The Midnight Court; but there is no concept of sex as love, no feeling of sexual love being a spiritual or even a romantic force. The romantic concept of sexual love was developed inordinately in Western literature from the time of the troubadours, in literary Courts of Love, as well as in love-poetry in general. But as Johan Huizanga points out, a more archaic viewpoint co-existed with this concept during the middle-ages:

We should picture to ourselves two layers of civilization superimposed, co-existing though contradictory. Side by side with the courtly style of literary and rather recent origin, the primitive forms of erotic life kept all their force. . . . [This] vision of never-ending lust implies no less than the screwed-up system of courtly love, an attempt to substitute for the reality the dream of a happier life. It is once more the aspiration towards the life sublime, but this time viewed from the animal side. . . . ⁹

The archaic viewpoint prevailed very much in older rooted rural communities, and it is obviously the viewpoint of Merriman in this poem. Romantic love inside or outside marriage scarcely exists as far as this poem is concerned. Communion of mind or spirit is not entertained. If put to express the matter; Merriman (to judge by this poem) might easily have said that 'love' was a game or artifice invented by human beings to mask the preponderant animal vigour in their natures, which in his view was one of the greatest of human gifts.

Whatever Merriman might have felt or said on matters such as this, he didn't express it in his poem in any coherent way. The artistic indication of this is that the mounting feeling of indignation regarding the waste of our human animal potential peters out in the series of lukewarm conciliatory positions taken up in the final section of the poem. In Aoibheall's lack-lustre judgment, nothing insightful or memorable is proposed or felt. Frank O'Connor says:

". . . from the moment the Queen gets up to deliver judgment the poem falls away. Clearly this was intended to be the point at which Merriman would speak through her, and express his own convictions about life, but something went wrong!"¹⁰

What most likely went wrong was that Merriman had no ready answers to offer about life. In this, of course, he was no different from some of the greatest of writers or artists. Unfortunately for him, however, the Court of Love traditional concluding structure demanded balanced rational answers of a kind a real poet cannot give. It is quite probable, then, that the Court of Love apparatus finally ended up for him more a hindrance than a help. Some more irrational or surrealistic type of concluding structure might have helped Merriman to reveal more climactically his dark, archaic feelings.

These feelings were obviously quite closely linked to the matter of his own illegitimate birth. Indeed the emotional climax of the poem as it stands is the old man's plea for bastards. One senses here more than anywhere else in the poem Merriman's personal statement as he struggles to deal in comic terms with a grievous personal hurt. In fact he goes so far as to have himself proudly introduced by the old man to the court as a first-class advertisement for illegitimacy.

The ostensible reason for the whole love-debate is said by the vision-woman at the beginning to be the declining population of the country; but the pressing artistic reason most likely was the poet's need to dramatize and understand some profound inner disturbance emanating from the circumstances of his own birth. In this reading one is tempted to see the Court of Love structure used by the poet as a device by which he can put his own mother and (legal) father in the dock. For whether one looks on the young woman who speaks to the Court as Merriman's mother or not, she certainly presents the point of view of a (gadabout) girl who can't find a suitable mate (Monologue I), and later (in Monologue III), of a girl who, for whatever reason, is finally married off to an old man. And whether or not one looks on the old man who speaks to the Court as the travelling mason whom Merriman's mother married, he certainly presents the point of view of one who was harnessed in marriage to a young woman pregnant by some other man. President Aoibheall's judgment that young people should be free to couple freely, and old men ready to lend their names to illegitimates (and so preserve the institution of marriage) is in a sense then a validation of Merriman's situation as a child reared by a father not his own.

In trying to understand the hurt inflicted on Merriman by his illegitimacy it would probably be a mistake to think of illegitimacy as inevitably carrying the same type of slur in eighteenth-century Ireland as it did in the nineteenth-century Ireland, especially in the post-Famine period. Merriman's feeling here must have been much nearer that of aristocratic Gaelic Ireland than of post-famine Victorian Ireland. Values and arrangements in matters connected with sex and marriage in aristocratic Gaelic Ireland remained to the end quite at odds with Christian teaching. Different types of marriage, divorce and so on, were allowed by the brehon laws. Bishops and priests had wives ('concubines'). What Christians stigmatise as illegitimacy didn't exist as a concept—women were often proud to 'name' their sons after their aristocratic lovers and requisite arrangements were made it seems for their future. All this reflects the values of the Irish 'heroic' (pagan) society which prevailed by and large against the assaults of Christianity right up at least to the first half of the seventeenth century. One cannot see Brian Merriman in the year 1780 in County Clare being unaffected by such values. After all it was only a little over a hundred years before the date of Merriman's birth that the British Parliament (1634) passed an act forbidding polygamy amongst the Irish. And it was less than a hundred years before the date of Merriman's birth that an Irish poet reports (c. 1655) that it was still the custom to be unchristianly flexible about matters of love and marriage: "bean isteach is amach ag aoinfhear."¹¹ Merriman may have been strongly influenced in the manner of his writing about these matters by Court of Love themes or Elizabethan ballads—he may even have been influenced by whatever he read or heard of the ideas of Rousseau and other writers of the age—but it seems virtually certain that the deeper feelings he is expressing throughout are the archaic feelings of his own traditional society. In fact it is expressly stated in The Midnight Court as a part of the old man's praise of bastards, that with the advent of free love an Irish heroic society would emerge again. Men would inherit the strength and body of a Goll Mac Mó rna, says the old man, heroic vigour would burgeon anew in fruitfullness. "It is", as Huizanga said, "once more an aspiration towards the life sublime, but this time viewed from the animal side."

English Common Law—with increasing aid from the Catholic Church—was engaged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in combating both the ideals and the old practical arrangements regarding love and marriage in Gaelic Ireland. Under the growing power of English law, the legal position of an illegitimate in County Clare in 1750 would, of course, be a far cry from the relatively favoured position of the illegitimate in older times. Local lore has it that Merriman's natural father was a minor aristocrat, a gentleman (duine uasal) called McNamara. In the old Irish dispensation Merriman might have been proudly calling himself McNamara (or whatever) and could have inherited land or been placed in a lucrative career. In the new dispensation his noble lineage was disparaged, and he ended up on a small farm of land with a travelling mason as father and the career of a hedgeschoolmaster possibly the only one open to him. Was it the diminution of status and prospects for a person of his birth—rather than the strong social stigma later on attached to illegitimacy—which wounded Merriman? It is virtually certain, I think, that it was. Such diminution might also account for his courting of the local gentry rather than the poets. It also might explain what appears to be an irrelevant non-comic harangue against English law in the Prologue to the poem, where it is stated that remnants of the old aristocracy now "have neither wealth nor freedom".

There is one more matter worth mentioning in relation to Merriman's trauma: that is the possibility that the gentleman who was his natural father may have been a priest or seminarian. (It has to be stated immediately, however, that there seems to be no suggestion whatever in local lore, or otherwise, that this was so.)

A priest being married or engaging in sex would have been no novel idea to anyone with a knowledge of traditional (including eighteenth-century) life in Ireland. Indeed the young woman states in the poem that priests whom she calls mian ár gcroí ('the desire of our hearts') were known for their philandering propensities, and that a number of their progeny existed bearing false names. I have no knowledge, however, that the question of marriage for priests was in any way a live issue in eighteenth-century Ireland; and except in the context of Merriman's natural father being a priest or seminarian can one make artistic or emotional sense of the elaborate and passionate plea made by the young girl (who I suggested may be expressing Merriman's mother's viewpoint) that priests should be allowed to marry, or understand the concern of Aoibheall when she assures the court that indeed they should, and would in time, be so allowed:

the time will come with the Council's sanction
and the Pope applying his potent hand;
a committee will sit on the country's ills
and release to you all, under binding bonds,
a torrent of blood, a storm of flesh,
those ardent slashers—your heart's desire!

Whatever further evidence does emerge in time about either Merriman's personal trauma or the literary background to his poem, it is reasonably clear I think that a prodigious creative comic energy was unleashed by him as he endeavoured to articulate his grievance within a framework yoked together from medieval bits and pieces. There may be no "sense of the incommensurate" in the poem—as Daniel Corkery claimed—but there is certainly more than a hint of a somewhat uncomprehending hurt, half-struggling to reveal itself.

In the undistinguished Epilogue, perhaps the liveliest sections are those which deal with Merriman's punishment because of his not being married. Despite the alarming fear which the poem attributes to him in the face of that punishment, he did not in fact marry for some nine years after the composition of The Midnight Court. He was then somewhere around his fiftieth year; which, even in County Clare, is nearer the average age of death than marriage.

Notes

¹ For a detailed comparison between The Midnight Court and various medieval works of the Court of Love genre see my essay "Cúirt an Mheán Oíche", Studia Hibernica (Dublin, 1964), pp. 7-27.

² Máirín Ní Mhuirgheasa, Feasta, May, 1951.

³The Origin and Sources of the Court of Love (Boston, 1899), p. 214.

⁴ Nina Epton, Love and the English (Penguin, 1964), p. 102.

⁵ Ibid., p. 103.

⁶ This speculation reverses a former suggestion of mine in "Cúirt an Mheán Oíche", Studia Hibernica, p. 19, that the Court of Love genre might have existed already in the fifteenth or sixteenth century Gaelic literary tradition.

⁷ For various viewpoints see R. A. Fraser, The Court of Venus (Duke University Press, 1955) and C. A. Huttar, "Wyatt and the Several Editions of the Court of Venus", Studies in Bibliography XIX (1966), 181-95.

⁸ Ibid., Studia Hibernica, p. 23.

⁹The Waning of the Middle Ages (Penguin, 1955), pp. 110-12.

¹⁰ Frank O'Connor, The Midnight Court (London, 1945), p. 10.

¹¹ Cecile O'Rahilly, Five Seventeenth Century Political Poems (Dublin, 1952), p. 73.