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    The Secret Commonwealth
    The Secret Commonwealth
    The Secret Commonwealth
    Ebook29 pages23 minutes

    The Secret Commonwealth

    By Catherine Czerkawska

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    There can be few stories stranger than that of Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle in late seventeenth century Scotland. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, which supposedly gave him powers to communicate with the supernatural world. He wrote his treatise about that other world and the creatures we know as fairies in 1691, and called it The Secret Commonwealth. Only 100 copies were made and it was lost until 1815 at which time that inveterate antiquarian, and hunter after lost treasures, Sir Walter Scott, found it and had it printed.

    Kirk had lived through the years when strict Presbyterianism was in the process of criminalising the observance of various folk customs and beliefs – labelling them as the work of the devil – a process which would continue more or less until the present day. He was a fine scholar and an exponent of the Gaelic language and had been engaged in the task of translating the metrical psalms into Gaelic, as well as going to London to help supervise the printing of the first Gaelic bible. But when he became minister at Aberfoyle, Kirk took to walking on the 'fairy hill' (a numinous place, even today), and was found dead there in 1692. Rumours swiftly followed that he had disappeared, had been taken by the fairy folk for betraying their secrets, and that the body in the tomb was a 'co-walker' and not a real human corpse at all.

    This play, about Robert Kirk, by award winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska was written for and staged at the Oran Mor in Glasgow in February 2010.

    'Using the voice of the lost minister himself – played by Liam Brennan with a terrific combination of emotional commitment and sheer technical command – Czerkawska transforms the story into a lyrical yet driven 50-minute lament over Scotland's failure to integrate its dour Presbyterian faith and dogged Enlightenment rationalism with the wilder, more beautiful and more sensual aspects of its Gaelic heritage...between them, Czerkawska and Brennan come close to making (Kirk) a real hero for our times, desperately struggling for ways to move on from an arid, over-rationalised modernism, without sinking back into the darkness of mindless superstition..'
    Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman, February 2010

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCatherine Czerkawska
    Release dateSep 16, 2014
    ISBN9781502232533
    The Secret Commonwealth
    Author

    Catherine Czerkawska

    Catherine Czerkawska is a critically acclaimed writer of long and short fiction, non-fiction and plays. Her novels include The Curiosity Cabinet, The Physic Garden, Bird of Passage and The Jewel, about the life of Robert Burns’s wife, Jean Armour.  In 2019 Contraband published A Proper Person to be Detained, an intriguing exploration of family history that takes us from 19th-century Ireland to the industrial heartlands of England and Scotland. Following on from this, The Last Lancer is a personal account of loss and survival in Poland and Ukraine, a book with a tragic resonance, given the current situation in that country.  Catherine's stage plays include Wormwood, about the Chernobyl disaster, and Quartz, both commissioned by Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. She has also written more than 100 hours of drama for BBC Radio 4. She spent four years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of the West of Scotland and when not writing, collects and deals in the antique textiles that occasionally find their way into her fiction.

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      Book preview

      The Secret Commonwealth - Catherine Czerkawska

      THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH

      Catherine Czerkawska

      Contents

      Author’s Note

      ROBERT KIRK

      Author’s Note

      The set is simple, with – as a possible backdrop – a stylised representation of the ‘Hill of the Fairies’, Dun Sidhean, (now called Doon Hill) at Aberfoyle.

      There is a single character, Robert Kirk, but also a musician and/or singer. The  right ‘sound’ for this would be traditional Irish sean nos singing, for a female voice, mostly unaccompanied, with that wonderful, highly ornamented, wavering sound. But if music is needed, it has to have that same strange otherworldly quality - which is also found in the Gaelic psalms sung in the Western Isles, and which seems to be the christianised version of a much older tradition.

      A large part of Kirk’s experience involved listening to what was going on around him. The music, voice and/or instrumental, should therefore be very much a part of the play, rather than just an accompaniment.

      Kirk is a man in his forties or fifties. His native tongue would have been Gaelic (then called ‘Irish’ as opposed to ‘Scots’) so his English could have a highland accent, although this isn’t vital, as long as he is Scottish. There is some doubt about the age he was when he ‘died’ and although it doesn’t matter at all what he looks like, I think he must be absolutely compelling. He was a fine scholar, by no means a simple man – he travelled to London to oversee publication of a Gaelic bible - and he must have been a man of character. Therefore, he must be able to compel us to believe in the things he is telling us.  But there was another agenda at work here, rather than simple credulity, which it is probably worth explaining up front.

      The manuscript of the Secret Commonwealth was supposedly written in 1691. Kirk  died the following year, in 1692. A child was born posthumously, but he also had a

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