I used to have a performance of the Midnight Court on LP. Don't remember the names of the actors or any other details, only that some members of Horslips (although I think it was before that group was actually formed) did the background music. I am pretty sure that it has never been released on CD.
Is this true, I wonder? It certainly is possible. I am intrigued.
As for Midnight Court, on this recent visit I noticed that Ciaran Carson has done a translation of the eighteenth-century poem:
Carson echoes Merriman's mix of high rhetoric and rude colloquial wit and replicates his probing analysis of sexuality and social mores. The acrobatics of his couplets quicken the poem's passionate argument, capturing its nudges and winks in earthy, contemporary idiom.
What he calls Merriman's 'abundant lexicon of vilification . . . numerous double entendres and gorgeousness of verbal music' comes alive in his brilliant recreation. This Midnight Court unfolds with a spring — and a surprise — in every step.
There's an article by Carson in the Guardian about it too:
Merriman, in later life, must also have been an excellent farmer: in 1797, 17 years after the composition of "Cúirt an Mheán Oíche", the Royal Dublin Society awarded him two prizes, of model spinning wheels, for his flax crop. He was also, at various periods, resident tutor with one or other of the local gentry.
What else do we know? There is an oral tradition that he was the illegitimate son of a local squire, according to some; of a priest, according to others. The theory is given some credence by the paean to bastardy that occupies a great deal of the Old Man's speech in part three of the poem; and there is a further suggestion that he may have been familiar with the English poet Richard Savage's composition, "The Bastard": "Born to himself, by no possession led, / In freedom fostered, and by fortune fed; / Nor guides, nor rules his sovereign choice control, / His body independent as his soul; / Loosed to the world's wide range, enjoined no aim, / Prescribed no duty, and assigned no name: / Nature's unbounded son, he stands alone, / His heart unbiased, and his mind his own."
Another tradition has it that Merriman composed his poem when he was laid up with a leg injury, while he was engaged to be married; and his lines on the sexual prowess of the disabled, in the last part of the poem, are taken as corroboration of this speculation.
It is published by The Gallery Press. My first Gallery Press title was another volume of Carson, and that set off my habit of purchasing at least two or three titles from their list when I'm around bookstores that sell them. Amazingly, this predates my knowledge of the music of Horslips.
It all ties together -- or will once I get back to the website, but only after the holiday baking responsibilities are completed.
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