Henry Burnell (author)

Henry Burnell (fl.1630s-40s, d.1656) was an Irish politician, playwright and landowner of the seventeenth century. The details of his life are not well recorded, but it is known that he was a prominent member of the Irish Confederacy which governed much of Ireland between 1642 and 1649.

He was a member of a leading Dublin landowning family, who forfeited most of their possessions after the failure of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. He is now remembered mainly as the author of Landgartha, the first play by an Irish playwright to be produced in an Irish theatre, and as the father of the poet Eleanor Burnell.^[1]