The 2025 Ian Donaldson Memorial lecture: Representing peace in Samuel Johnson's Irene (1749)

Representing Peace in Samuel Johnson's Irene (1749)
The 2025 Ian Donaldson Memorial Lecture

Recent scholarship identifies eighteenth-century London playhouses as crucial sites for negotiating the era's social and religious dilemmas. This paper re-examines Samuel Johnson’s play, Irene (1749), often regarded as a dramatic disappointment, by situating it within contemporary debates on religious toleration and the evolving definitions of peace these discussions produced. By comparing Irene to other period dramas featuring irenic figures (e.g., Haywood’s The Fair Captive (1721); Handel’s Tamerlano (1719) and Theodora (1751)), I locate Johnson’s play within a broader theatrical tradition grappling with peace amidst religious diversity. I argue that Irene, rather than simply a flawed tragedy, is deeply informed and constrained by the 'logic of toleration,' which governs and limits its representations of religious conviction, interfaith romance, and the irenic. This contextualization demonstrates the Georgian stage as a vital arena for exploring the complexities of peace in a religiously pluralistic age, revealing Irene as a nuanced reflection on toleration's pressures and possibilities.

Brandon Chua is Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses on Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature. He is currently Director of the Masters in Creative Communication and has published on a range of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century writers like John Banks, John Milton, Aphra Behn, and Eliza Haywood. He is currently completing a monograph on the representation of religious toleration in Eighteenth Century Drama, as well as a project on The Eighteenth-Century History Play. 

About the Ian Donaldson Memorial Lecture
This annual named lecture honours the memory of the late Professor Ian Donaldson FBA FRSE FAHA (1935-2020), who was the world expert on Ben Jonson, having written an acclaimed biography for Oxford (Ben Jonson: A Life, 2011) and served as General Editor of the seven-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012) with David Bevington and Martin Butler. The annual lectures reflect topics of interest to Prof. Donaldson, including early modern drama and poetry, literary biography, and textual editing, and are organised by the English and Theatre Studies program with support from the Shakespeare400 Trust.

Please send your enquiries to Prof. David McInnis via mcinnisd@unimelb.edu.au