Irene (play)

Irene is a Neoclassical tragedy written between 1726 and 1749 by Samuel Johnson. It has the distinction of being the work Johnson considered his greatest failure. Since his death, the critical consensus has been that he was right to think so.

Irene was Johnson's only play, and was first performed on 6 February 1749 in a production by his friend and former pupil, David Garrick. The play was a commercial success and earned Johnson more money than anything else he had written up to that point. It was never revived during his lifetime, and there is no subsequent evidence of any other full-scale productions of Irene anywhere until 1999, making it one of the most unsuccessful plays ever written by a major author.

Johnson began writing Irene around 1726 when he first began to work in his father's bookshop. While in the bookshop he befriended Gilbert Walmesley, the Registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court of Lichfield. Johnson would discuss Irene with Walmesley, and read him some of the early drafts. At one point, Walmesley told Johnson that "he was making Irene suffer so much in the first part of the play that there would be nothing left for her to suffer in the later part". Johnson joked that there was "enough in reserve... I intend to put my heroine into the ecclesiastical court of Lichfield which will fill up the utmost measure of human calamity".

Johnson wrote a considerable part of Irene in 1737 while teaching at Edial Hall School, the academy he had founded in 1735. Johnson spent his evenings working on his play while ignoring his wife Elizabeth (known as Tetty). This provoked David Garrick, his student, to perform a skit mocking the incidents, although the incidents he portrayed were more than likely his own fabrications. However, the play was written mostly for Mrs. Johnson; she was fond of it and hoped it would be a success. Her belief in the play inspired Johnson to finish it and push to have it performed. When Edial Hall failed, Johnson travelled to London and brought the unfinished manuscript with him. In 1737, Johnson tried to submit Irene to Charles Fleetwood, the owner-manager of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, but Fleetwood rejected it on the grounds that there was no patron and his theatre was catering to other types of performances. Johnson tried in 1741 to have the unperformed play printed, but this too failed. He seems to have continued to revise it over the next several years, since a manuscript notebook contains draft material made not earlier than June 1746.

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