Criticism > Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism > Abbey Theatre in the Irish Literary Renaissance - Ann Saddlemyer (essay date 1980)


Abbey Theatre in the Irish Literary Renaissance - Ann Saddlemyer (essay date 1980)

Ann Saddlemyer (essay date 1980)

SOURCE: Saddlemyer, Ann. “The ‘Dwarf-Dramas’ of the Early Abbey Theatre.” In Yeats, Sligo and Ireland: Essays to Mark the 21st Yeats International Summer School, edited by A. Norman Jeffares, pp. 197-215. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom: Colin Smythe Ltd., 1980.

[In the following essay, Saddlemyer discusses contemporary artistic and political reactions to the poetic and peasant plays produced by the Abbey Theatre during the early years of the Irish Literary Renaissance.]

‘No one act play, no dwarf-drama, can be a knockdown argument’.

With these words James Joyce dismissed Riders to the Sea and, by implication, the Irish dramatic movement, adding that Ireland needed ‘less small talk and more irrefutable art’.1 Yet when this discussion between Synge and Joyce took place in Paris early in 1903, W. G. Fay's small company...

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