Making an Irish Free State City – Fr O’Flynn, Shakespeare and the education of the heart

The mid-1920s coincided with the emergence of Fr Seamus O’Flynn’s growing interest in Shakespeare.

The Cork Examiner on 17 December 1924 notes that under the auspices of the Fermoy Catholic Young Men's Society, Fr O'Flynn, accompanied by some of his pupils, delivered to a crowded house a most instructive and educational lecture entitled: How to Study Shakespeare.

The lecture in Fermoy was one of Fr O’Flynn’s first public lectures on the benefits of studying the work of Shakespeare. It was four years since the creation of the Cork Shakespearian Company and fifteen years since his first staging of a Shakespeare play in a Cork community setting.

Fr Fitzgerald, CC, President of the Fermoy CYM Society said it was his privilege to introduce Fr O'Flynn of the North Cathedral parish and highlighted that he was known beyond the limits of his native county, and well known to many friends present. Fr Fitzgerald outlined that for many years Fr O'Flynn had been an ardent promoter of the Irish language, Irish culture and Irish traditional music, and for many years had been promoting such interests and embedding them in local Cork communities.

Fr Fitzgerald articulated that in the local schools the plays of Shakespeare had been taught to the pupils year after year and year after year had been appearing on exam papers. Hence to him the lecture topic was not out of place to champion.

Fr O’Flynn was received with applause and at the outset he gave an explanatory discourse on the means necessary to read and recite well lines within Shakespearean plays. He showed how the thoughts of the writer should first be grasped and then delivered his thoughts as Shakespeare himself might have uttered them. He noted examples of lines from Hamlet.

He pointed out the methods involved to attain a perfect understanding of the construction of sentences, the ability to analyse complex forms of composition, to discriminate between essentials and expletive words and the regulation of the voice to suit the sound to the word.

“Nothing marked out a finished reader so clearly as his power of modulating his voice. It was by the subtle changes of tone that the infinite variety of feeling was represented. The effects should of course be natural, with no undue straining after effect.”

After the lecture Fr Fitzgerald, in his vote of thanks to Fr O’Flynn, noted that his explanation of how to interpret Shakespeare was “simple yet eloquent”, and his selections from the various plays were “apt and very instructive”. His demonstration of how each character could be found in ordinary daily life was “striking, clear and very real, even in some instances surprising to a degree”.

There are many pieces written on the life and times of Fr O’Flynn. One striking book by writer Richard O’Donoghue, entitled ‘Like a Tree Planted, Fr O’Flynn and the Loft’ and published in 1967, makes reference to Fr John Forde, parish priest, Newcestown, who was the literary executor for Fr O’Flynn when he died in 1962.

Richard writes that Fr John Forde gave him a suitcase filled with the notebooks and the recordings of Fr O’Flynn. Richard then supplemented his work by a series of interviews with members of the O’Flynn family, with past pupils of The Loft and with contemporaries of Fr O’Flynn in the North Cathedral Parish and at Passage West.

Richard writes that Cork born Fr O’Flynn’s interest in acting and performance can be traced back to his youth. Born in 1881, the young Seamus attended Blackpool National School and the North Monastery. In September 1899, he enrolled as a student at the junior seminary of Farranferris and on the accomplishment of his studies he went to St Patrick’s College, Maynooth,

On 20 June 1909, Fr O’Flynn was ordained. Cork’s Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas O’Callaghan cancelled an arrangement to send the newly appointed priest Fr O’Flynn from Maynooth to Portsmouth. He appointed him to the staff of the seminary at Farranferris to teach elocution. With a talent for acting, his well-developed voice and his love of Shakespeare, Fr O’Flynn was very content and most enthusiastic.

Later Fr O’Flynn wrote in one of his many notebooks: “I began in Farranferris in 1909. We put planks on porter barrels and covered them with an old carpet, and each year produced a full-length play of Shakespeare’s. Encouragement came from my bishop, Dr O’Callaghan – God be good to him-and from his relative, Dr Sexton, the president of the college. By means of Shakespeare I aimed not only at helping the students to speak correctly, but at a cultivation of the noble emotions – education of the heart.”

Early in 1910, Fr O’Flynn was appointed to serve as chaplain in Our Lady’s Hospital on the Lee Road. He said mass, administered the sacraments, visited the patients each day and frequently entertained them with his songs and dramatic pieces. There he also got a close up perspective of the human condition.

In 1910 Fr O’Flynn visited the Irish-speaking districts of West Cork and for the first time came in contact with the old Gaelic world and those who preserved the stories and championed them. He recorded: “There, rummaging among the ruins of the nation, I discovered the remnants of a supremely beautiful culture of emotion in language, story, song and dance still living in the hearts of these people, that completely captivated me.”

For many summers Fr O’Flynn spent his holidays in one or other of the Irish-speaking districts of Munster – Ballingeary or Gougane Barra, or Ring in county Waterford. But his favourite haunts lay far to the west in Kerry – Dunquin, the Blasket Islands and Ballinskelligs. It was there his interest in the marrying of education, culture, and storytelling developed even more and set him on a path to bring the power of storytelling further into the heart of Cork city’s communities.

To be continued…

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