[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 of nationalist amateurs had already started to make its name with one-act plays in both Irish and English: Douglas Hyde's Casadh an Tsugáin, AE's Deirdre, Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan, The Pot of Broth, The Hour-Glass, James Cousins's The Sleep of the King and The Racing Lug, P. T. McGinley's Eilis Agus an Bhean Déirce, and Lady Gregory's Twenty-Five. Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen and Seamas MacManus's The Townland of Tamney would soon follow, as would Yeats's The Shadowy Waters and the offending Riders to the Sea. By the time the Abbey Theatre formally opened in December 1904 with yet two more one-act plays, Yeats's On Baile's Strand and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News, the tradition of ‘dwarf-dramas’ was firmly established as a staple of the Irish National Theatre Society.²

James Joyce notwithstanding, there were sound reasons for this rash of playlets. For the frankly political organisations such as Maud Gonne's Daughters of Erin (who had sponsored the first productions of Deirdre and Cathleen ni Houlihan,) brief tableaux vivants and other amateur theatricals had been effective propaganda, assuring attentive audiences and keen participation; for the Gaelic League, they provided additional encouragement for learning the Irish language, drawing as they did upon a long tradition of dramatic dialogues.³ Actors from both these groups would join the Fay brothers to form the first national theatre company, and in turn seek out further plays to expand an evening's programme. In this way AE was urged to complete his Deirdre, and Douglas Hyde was banished to his guest room at Coole with scenarios drafted by Yeats and his hostess; finally Lady Gregory also turned from passive secretarial duties to active play-making, churning out comedies ‘to put beside the high poetic work’ of her colleagues. Collaboration was inevitable, and Yeats and Lady Gregory have both left moving records in their autobiographies and prefaces of the interdependence inspired by these exciting early years of experiment and challenge. Cooperation extended not only into the Irish language, but out towards dramatic theory with Frank Fay's learned criticisms in The United Irishman and Yeats's responses to them not only in that journal but in the many other literary and nationalist magazines of the period.⁴ It would continue with Florence Farr's erratic brilliance as a speaker of verse and Miss Horniman's magnificent gift of a theatre building.

But even before the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre by Yeats, Martyn and Lady Gregory, and while Willie and Frank Fay were still preparing traditional farces for Dublin coffee-houses, Yeats had taken up the challenges of the dramatic form. Early in 1889 he was writing enthusiastically to Katharine Tynan about his ‘new poem,’ The Countess Cathleen: ‘I shall try and get it acted by amateurs (if possible in Dublin) and afterwards try it perhaps on some stage manager or actor. It is in five scenes and full of action and very Irish.’ Several weeks later he admitted that Maud Gonne ‘felt inclined to help, indeed suggested the attempt herself if I remember rightly.’⁵ Yeats's determination to study his play in performance bore fruit when The Countess Cathleen received its first production in Dublin by the Irish Literary Theatre in 1889, but with Lady Gregory's help, not Maud Gonne's, and by an English cast supervised by George Moore. Perhaps more appropriately still, he had by then seen his one-act play The Land of Heart's Desire produced by Florence Farr at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894, with funds provided anonymously by Miss Horniman.

Yeats confided to his unpublished autobiography that he had put into this second play ‘my own despair. I could not tell why Maud Gonne had turned from me unless she had done so from some vague desire for some impossible life, for some unvarying excitement like that of the heroine of my play.’⁶ But whatever the original impulse (and the published play is dedicated to Florence Farr), The Land of Heart's Desire established not only a form but subject, argument, mood, setting and even characters which would recur again and again in the plays of Yeats and his collaborators. It is a simple telling of folk matter which he had already celebrated in ‘The Stolen Child’—the seduction of a soul seeking a completion not possible in the domestic life of the fireside with its arranged marriages, stockings of gold, and circumscription by aged parents, police and priest; the call by a melodious stranger, frequently glorified further by song or ballad, conjures up another world which may be glimpsed through the open door or window of the scrupulously realistic cottage setting. And although an apparent resolution occurs on the plane of action, the play itself ends on a question mark. This strange, yet familiar, wooing evokes distant memories in all who hear it; and the audience leaves the theatre disturbed, roused from a ‘base of realism’ to touch ‘the apex of beauty’ which according to Lady Gregory was the playwrights' ambition.⁷ It is the universal dream of escape from the commonplaces of every day, that ‘vague desire for some impossible life’; yet it remains specifically Irish also in its rejection of poverty, political oppression, and authoritarian strictures.

The Land of Heart's Desire was written in verse Yeats later believed too ornate, ‘mere ornament with dramatic value’, he did not allow a production, and then much revised, at the Abbey until 1911.⁸ Perhaps (though given his theatre's tempestuous determination to remain free of censorship it seems unlikely) he feared that the Priest's indulgent putting aside of the crucifix would rouse the ire of his Catholic audience; more likely he realized the risks involved in placing an all-too-human actress as fleet-footed Faery Child in a well-lighted traditional cottage interior. Whatever the reason, this one-act play does not appear to have been taken seriously by the early theatre movement, and so it was Cathleen ni Houlihan that Yeats offered to Willie Fay in 1902. Written once again with Maud Gonne in mind, this play avoided these pitfalls while following the same basic pattern. Where his earlier play was, he explained to The United Irishman, ‘in a sense, the call of the heart, the heart seeking its own dream; this play is the call of country, and I have a plan of following it up with a little play about the call of religion.’⁹ And this time he had Maud herself, carefully prepared under his own tutelage, to perform ‘with creepy realism’¹⁰ the half-mad old crone who calls Ireland's young manhood from fireside and bride, new clothes and old coins, to accompany her to battle. He also had a popular theme:

My subject is Ireland and its struggle for independence. The scene is laid in the West of Ireland at the time of the French landing. I have described a household preparing for the wedding of the son of the house. Everyone expects some good thing from the wedding. The bridegroom is thinking of his bride, the father of the fortune which will make them all more prosperous, and the mother of a plan of turning this prosperity to account by making her youngest son a priest, and the youngest son of a greyhound pup the bride promised to give him when she marries. Into this household comes Kathleen Ni Houlihan herself, and the bridegroom leaves his bride, and all the hopes come to nothing. It is the perpetual struggle of the cause of Ireland and every other ideal cause against private hopes and dreams, against all that we mean when we say the world.¹¹

Two years later in a memorandum submitted for the Abbey Theatre's application for a patent, he was to play down this strident political voice: ‘It may be said that it is a political play of a propagandist kind. This I deny. I took a piece of human life, thoughts that men had felt, hopes they had died for, and I put this into what I believe to be a sincere dramatic form.’¹² But by then Maire nic Shiubhlaigh had replaced Maud Gonne as Cathleen with ‘weird beauty and intense pathos’; with the performances by her and Sara Allgood (whose photograph with upraised arm, standing in the cottage doorway before a kneeling Michael became the postcard advertisement for the play), and even later on the occasion when Lady Gregory stepped into the role, Ireland's Joan of Arc had given way to Eire's Mother of Sorrow.¹³

But whether with the statuesque Maud Gonne's aura of ‘a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity’¹⁴ or the more measured tones of later actresses, the language retained its hypnotic power, brought down with Lady Gregory's help ‘from that high window of dramatic verse’ which had framed Yeats's earlier plays. During his lifetime Yeats eloquently acknowledged Lady Gregory's share in the making of Cathleen ni Houlihan, especially her responsibility in dialogue: ‘I had not the country speech. … We turned my dream into the little play, “Cathleen ni Houlihan”, and when we gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the working people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic fables into speech.’¹⁵ It has even been suggested that to her goes the credit for perhaps the most famous line of all, ‘They shall be remembered for ever’.¹⁶ It is likely, also, that she encouraged a stronger contrast between ‘the matter-of-fact ways of the household and the weird, uncanny conduct of the strange visitor’ noted by Joseph Holloway.¹⁷ Certainly, in comparison with Yeats's two earlier plays, the cottage kitchen is more realistic, the elder Gillanes more country shrewd and penny wise, gold coins are ostentatiously fingered at the kitchen table, and young Peter's ambition, a greyhound pup, is similarly rooted. Later Yeats was to think the language, though true in temper, lacked richness and abundance.¹⁸ Yet the very prosaic nature of this life confined to the comforts of home and hearth, its cosy vulgarisms and awkward appeal, is in the graspable present, while the lonely road seen from the doorway promises evanescent glory, the romance of time past and a place in future mythology. The intruder's magic is further preserved by having transformation take place offstage, where sentiment has no place and the ending is once again disturbingly ambivalent. Momentarily wrapped in the nobility of the chosen, with no opportunity for weighing the scales, we realize only later that Kathleen's pathway leads to death. It is the parodox of the heroic fool, where reasoned argument has no place by the instinct for gesture.

The playwrights had some difficulty adjusting these various contrasting elements. On opening night the audience received with delighted laughter the mild humour of the opening movement; Yeats reported to Lady Gregory, ‘it took them some little while to realize the tragic meaning of Kathleen's part, though Maud Gonne played it magnificently, and with weird power.’ He contemplated striking a tragic note at the start, but when after a second performance there appeared to be ‘no difficulty in getting from humour to tragedy,’ he wisely refrained from tampering.¹⁹ This shock of making the familiar strange depended much also on acting style, and Yeats praised ‘the illusion of daily life’ Fay's company provided for his play, while admiring the ‘decorative acting’ they had achieved for AE's Deirdre on the same programme.²⁰ When George Moore urged that Maud Gonne ‘walk up and down all the time in front of the footlights,’ Yeats countered that ‘she was as it were wandering in a dream, made restless as it were by the coming rebellion, but with no more fixed intention than a dreamer has.’ ‘She looks far ahead and far backward and cannot be excited in that sense, or rather she will be a less poetical personage if she is.’²¹ He now knew what he wanted, and was at last able to distinguish between ‘the essentially modern,’ ‘natural school’ admired by Edward Martyn, and ‘Irish-trained Irish actors who are likely to be extravagant, romantic, oratorical, and traditional, like Irish poetry and legend themselves.’²²

The Pot of Broth, written probably during the same summer as Cathleen ni Houlihan, was an even closer collaboration between Yeats and Lady Gregory, and very much dependent upon the crude simplicity of Willie Fay's small company of amateurs. Again setting and subject are familiar: a wandering Tramp invades country kitchen with an audacious blending of folk-tale (a variation on the goose that lays the golden eggs) and folk-song. The situation has something in common with McGinley's Eilis Agus an Bhean Déirce, which Yeats and Lady Gregory had come up from Coole to see when produced by the Fays' Ormonde Dramatic Society for the Daughters of Erin in August 1901; but the comedy of the Irish play depends mainly on a young son's tricking his mother with Maeve the beggar woman unwittingly supporting him, the ending a grand crescendo of cursing as Maeve flounces out. We are given little beyond the clever device, although that similarity may well have influenced Yeats to alter his original title, The Beggarman. The Pot of Broth extends plot situation and develops characterisation, first by the use of folk airs (one, ‘There's Broth in the Pot,’ taken down by Lady Gregory herself from Cracked Mary, later to be immortalized by Yeats in his Crazy Jane poems), second by the wide reference to folk tradition, with which the cunning Tramp lulls the young wife out of her usual shrewish suspicion into a jovial, more generous mood. The play ends with the elderly husband John accompanying the Tramp, ‘a very gifted man,’ up the boreen with his prizes, as the priest appears above, innocently expecting his dinner. Later Yeats would disparage the dialect for not having the ‘right temper, being gay, mercurial, and suggestive of rapid speech’ rather than ‘the slow-moving country dialect,’ perhaps unconsciously comparing it with Synge's country comedies.²³ What remained in his memory was William Fay as tramp, who ‘played it not only with great humour but with great delicacy and charm.’ ‘That trivial, unambitious retelling of an old folk-tale showed William Fay for the first time as a most lovable comedian. He could play dirty tramp, stupid countryman, legendary fool, insist on dirt and imbecility, yet play—paradox of the stage—with indescribable personal distinction.’²⁴

The style of this little play, ‘the first comedy in dialect of our movement,’ won other admirers. Arthur Griffith, editor of The United Irishman and soon to become the noisiest objector to In the Shadow of the Glen, praised The Pot of Broth on its first production as ‘the first Irish piece which is not a caricature.’²⁵ And two years later in an unsigned review of a production of Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun, J. M. Synge commented, ‘It is fortunate for the Irish National Theatre Society that it has preserved—in plays like The Pot of Broth—a great deal of what was best in the traditional comedy of the Irish stage, and still has contrived by its care and taste to put an end to the reaction against the careless Irish humour of which everyone has had too much.’²⁶ Synge remained fond of the play, recommending it (against Lady Gregory's wishes) as a curtain-raiser to his longer country comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, where the same features recur though circumstances differ—a dirty tramper woos the women, carries off the prizes and the admiration of the audience—and where again performance by Willie Fay required the apparently opposing qualities of poetry and farce. However, the trickster who remained most clearly in Synge's mind was that of Hanrahan, played by Douglas Hyde, in Casadh an Tsugáin. Later he was to describe this ‘charming little playlet’ as ‘in some ways the most important of all those produced by the Irish Literary Theatre, as it alone has had an influence [on] the plays that have been written since and have built up the present movement.’²⁷ On the occasion of its first production alongside Yeats and Moore's Diarmuid and Grania in October 1901, he summarized most accurately the various elements mingled not only in the one-act plays we have already noticed, but in the audience for whom they were written:

It was the first time that a play in Irish had ever been acted in a theatre, and the enthusiastic members of the Gaelic League stormed the cheaper seats. In spite of the importance of the League, when it organizes a demonstration one always senses (as in all deep-seated popular movements) the ridiculous rubbing shoulders with feelings of profound emotion. Thus, at the beginning of the play one could not help but smile at seeing all around the room the beautiful girls of the Gaelic League, who were chattering away in very bad Irish with palely enthusiastic young clerks. But during an intermission of Diarmuid and Grania it happened that the people in the galleries began to sing, as is the custom in this theatre. They sang the old songs of the people. Until then I had never heard these songs sung in the ancient Irish tongue by so many voices. The auditorium shook. In these lingering notes, of incomparable sadness, there was something like the death-rattle of a nation. I saw one head bend down behind a program, and then another. People were weeping.

Then the curtain rose and the play was resumed in the midst of lively emotion. One sensed that the spirit of a nation had hovered for an instant in the room.²⁸

Douglas Hyde's play, written at Coole one summer from a scenario provided by Yeats, finds its comedy in a trickster tricked: Hanrahan, a wheedling rogue who is spell-binding with his talk and poetry, arrives at a farmhouse in Munster during the celebration of a marriage arranged for the widow's daughter and proceeds to woo her in front of the entire company. Alarmed at the stranger's skills as dancer and poet, her fiancé is encouraged by the woman of the house and her neighbours to oust Hanrahan by persuading him to make a hay-rope; as the need for a hay-rope is enlarged upon, so Hanrahan's pride as a Connacht man increases, until finally he agrees to twist the hay-rope and is manoeuvred out through the door. The comedy ends with the Munster folk congratulating the widow and her daughter on a narrow escape as the fiddler strikes up for another dance, while the poet Hanrahan hammers on door and windows, his mighty oaths rendered powerless. Hyde himself, moustaches bristling, played Hanrahan with verve. ‘A born actor,’ declared The Freeman's Journal: ‘His eloquent tenderness to Una threw into strong relief the fierce savagery and scorching contempt with which he turned on Sheamus and his friends when they attempted to interrupt him, and his soft, weird crooning of his passionate verses was inimitable.’²⁹ Looking back from the distance of his autobiographies, Yeats marvelled at the facility and style of Hyde's plays, almost all of them written speedily from scenarios provided by Yeats or Lady Gregory, and saw there one of the keys to his own concern with style and dialect and to his ambitions for the dramatic movement of which he was a part:

His Gaelic, like the dialect of his Love Songs of Connacht, written a couple of years earlier, had charm, seemed all spontaneous, all joyous, every speech born out of itself. Had he shared our modern preoccupation with the mystery of life, learnt our modern construction, he might have grown into another and happier Synge. … He had the folk mind as no modern man has had it, its qualities and its defects, and for a few days in the year Lady Gregory and I shared his absorption in that mind. … He wrote in joy and at great speed because emotion brought the appropriate word. Nothing in that language of his was abstract, nothing worn-out. … I read him, translated by Lady Gregory or by himself into that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary; little was, I think, lost. … I began to test my poetical inventions by translating them into like speech. Lady Gregory had already, I think, without knowing it, begun a transformation of her whole mind into the mind of the people, begun ‘to think like a wise man’ but to express herself like ‘the common people.’³⁰

Not only did Lady Gregory provide Hyde with scenarios, she translated his plays into English, using the dialect later perfected as ‘Kiltartanese.’ For her, as for Synge, Hyde's work heralded the beginning of modern Irish drama,³¹ but simultaneously she too was determining the direction of that movement. Not surprisingly given her contribution to the plays already discussed, A Losing Game, her first independent attempt, bears all the hallmarks already noted: a cottage kitchen in the west, an arranged marriage, the uninvited stranger who speaks eloquently and allegorically of a great loss, references to folk songs, much discussion of hard times and the counting out of money, concluding with the rejection of material comforts for a dream of another world. When it was rejected by the Fays because it ‘might encourage emigration,’ she re-wrote it as Twenty-Five, but the basic plot remained the same: a young man returns from America to seek his promised bride, ‘looking for a treasure I had a dream about,’ only to find that in despair she had married someone else—an older man—the previous year; learning that the couple are about to be evicted, the stranger challenges the farmer to a game of cards, and despite the young wife's objections, refuses to take back the money that he has lost. Yeats wrote encouragingly to Lady Gregory after its 1903 performance, ‘I thought your play went very well. Fay was charming as Christie. The game of cards is still the weak place, but with all defects the little play has a real charm. If we could amend the cards it would be a strong play too.’³² But the playwright disliked the sentimentalism and the fact that it ended weakly ‘as did for the most part the Gaelic plays that began to be written, in a piper and a dance.’³³ She tried to lay the ghost of sentiment by writing the farcical Jackdaw (1907), and parodying the main theme by turning the setting from country into town, the benefactor into a suspicious curmudgeon who is caught up in the trick he originally suggested. Dissatisfied, twenty years later she provided a further commentary on the emotions and theme of her first play in On the Racecourse (1926), abolishing community altogether, making all three characters penurious rogues, the stranger cheated by the cheating husband, and songs highlighted.

The ruthlessness with which she covered her self-admitted ‘leaning towards sentimentality’ in part explains why Lady Gregory's next play, Spreading the News (1904), was a striking departure from the one-act plays already in the theatre's repertoire. Like her comedy Hyacinth Halvey (1906), cottage interior and family cosiness are eschewed for the brilliant sunlight of the Cloon Fair Green and Town Square; all members of this cracked community live their separate lives and dreams, and laughter arises out of their lack of communication; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are one and the same, and the plot spirals unbroken as each Cloonite helpfully contributes his message to the overburdened narrative. ‘The talk is all,’ and as quickly as disaster threatens, it and its meaning are dispersed in nonsense. Carefully crafted to keep sentiment out and invite laughter in, the plays, though redolent of the language of western Ireland, are set in no man's land. The door of wonder is indeed ajar, but everyone enters.

All the more puzzling, therefore, that her moving little nationalist drama, The Rising of the Moon, although accepted by the company as early as February 1904 and published the same year, was not produced until March 1907. For here we have a striking development of, and commentary on, Cathleen ni Houlihan. Once again the setting is the west of Ireland, but the time is the present,³⁴ and the site is the Galway quays by moonlight. Three policemen enter in search of a runaway rebel; the sergeant is left on guard alone, and a ballad-singer joins him. He is the escaped prisoner in disguise, and in a brief twenty minutes or so, with only his eloquence and his patriotic ballads to aid him, the stranger has won over the Sergeant to the friendship of ‘Granuaile’ and the time when ‘the small rise up and the big fall down … when we all change places at the Rising of the Moon.’ Emphasising—and thereby escaping into the objectivity of comedy—the duality of moonlit patriotism and sunlit reason at the end of the play, in a peculiarly Gregorian twist to Yeats's blending of humour and tragedy, the Sergeant's last words spoken directly to the audience are, ‘A hundred pounds reward! A hundred pounds! I wonder now, am I as great a fool as I think I am?’ The question called forth opposing answers: Lady Gregory reports that ‘the play was considered offensive to some extreme Nationalists before it was acted, because it showed the police in too favourable a light, and a Unionist paper attacked it after it was acted because the policeman was represented “as a coward and a traitor”; but after the Belfast police strike that same paper praised its “insight into Irish character”.’³⁵ Heroic folly has been reduced to the paradox of patriotism.

Although The Shadow of the Glen, like Riders to the Sea and the first draft of The Tinker's Wedding, was written before Synge attended a performance of Fay's company in December 1902, he had already joined forces with Yeats and Lady Gregory and described his mixed feelings during the performance of Casadh an Tsugáin. He had also rejected the autobiographical When the Moon Has Set, but not before his colleagues had noticed the striking difference between the dialect of his country people and the journalism written for the towns—the same anomaly Yeats had observed in Douglas Hyde.³⁶ Now, shortly after the appearance of Kathleen ni Houlihan, Synge presented his play of cottage life. Again the seductive stranger sings of a life beyond the cottage door; we see the effects of an arranged marriage between May and January, and the fruits of that security, a stocking of money, counted over, then rejected; the cottage setting itself is scrupulously copied from life (Synge knew well the cottage and glen he had chosen); again a trick is played, catching the trickster. And once more the moods of comedy and romance are mingled, leaving the audience disturbed and shocked into another reality. But where Kathleen ni Houlihan raised a shudder of presentiment, and The Pot of Broth ended with comfortable laughter, The Shadow of the Glen catches the observer midway, swinging between the comedy of resolution as Dan Burke and his erstwhile rival settle down for a quiet drink, and the dangerous world of the shadows themselves, into which Nora and the sweetly singing Tramp are banished. Throughout the play Nora has come to terms with and overcome her need for fireside, ‘the half of a dry bed, and good food in your mouth’. The greater need, protection from the shadows which devoured Patch Darcy and threaten her own sanity, can be outfaced only by something more powerful than material comforts, even more powerful than her own strong urge to sexuality and motherhood. (We are given an indication by Synge's own change in stage directions from one published draft to another: first the Tramp makes his final most lyrical speech in defiance of Dan; then he pulls her eagerly by the sleeve; finally he stands quietly at the door.) By joining the Tramp she enters into a further reality beyond his lyricism: ‘I'm thinking it's myself will be wheezing that time with lying down under the Heavens when the night is cold, but you've a fine bit of talk, stranger, and it's with yourself I'll go.’ Only with someone whose imaginative perceptions encompass the threat and intense beauty of nature can she find refuge from the loneliness haunting her of time passing her by.

The Shadow of the Glen (Synge dropped the initial word In after its first production) created the first serious split in the audience's response to the Irish National Theatre Company. Shortly after Synge's death Yeats was to identify the qualities which were partly responsible for that rejection:

… always throughout his plays you will find this, the grotesque reality beside the vision. Every one of his plays comes down to that when you analyse it. [In The Well of the Saints] you have two old blind people, for instance, who are awakened, brought back to sight by a saint, and what they see with their eyes is merely the grotesque reality compared with their vision, and they go back into their blindness, and when the saint wishes to cure them again they refuse with indignation. Then you have The Shadow of the Glen, where you have a passionate woman with desire, of every kind of splendour life has to give, who spends her life between a young milksop, a man who goes mad on the mountains, and a half-drunken dirty tramp!³⁷

Just as bluntly, Synge explained the audience's reaction to his close friend Stephen MacKenna: ‘On [the] French stage you get sex without its balancing elements: on [the] Irish stage you [get] the other elements without sex. I restored sex and the people were so surprised they saw the sex only.’³⁸ But to emphasize Nora's sensuality (played by Maire nic Shiubhlaigh with innocent intensity³⁹) is, in turn, to see only one aspect, the romance, at the expense of the equally important comic element in the play; indeed, to isolate the sexual passion suggested in this lonely woman of the hills is to do injustice to the other kinds of romance Synge borrowed, while heightening, from the earlier plays of the movement. And each element is, in turn, commented upon through the devices of comedy.

The first movement of the play builds on the audience's expectations from earlier cottage dramas: a stranger appears out of the darkness and almost immediately establishes a sympathetic alliance with the woman of the house. This is familiar, but different: instead of the enclosed harmony of the family we are offered a man who ‘was always queer’ both in life and now in death, cold ‘every day … and every night’; instead of the uninvited visitor taking command of action and subject, he is at first relegated to the secondary role of observer and comic chorus, bringing messages from the heroic dead.⁴⁰ The mood intensifies as Patch Darcy's spirit is evoked, then lightened by the first of Dan's ‘resurrections.’ During the second movement, when the audience is now aware of two eavesdroppers, thus creating a parody of the romantic theme developed on stage, once again the intensity of Nora's feeling is heightened only to be punctured by Dan's second comic resurrection. The final movement holds the opposing moods in balance, with the Tramp embodying both the heroic folly of the dead Patch Darcy and the promise of romantic nature Nora sought unsuccessfully in Michael Dara. Here the call from the fireside to another world is achieved without either sentiment or patriotism, for the world evoked by the Tramp is present day Wicklow brushed with the folly and dreams of the folksong.

Synge would borrow again from Cathleen ni Houlihan and The Twisting of the Rope in his comedy The Tinker's Wedding and even in The Playboy; he would further develop his aesthetic concerning the tension of ‘the dreamer … leaning out to reality’, ‘the timber of poetry that has … strong roots among the clay and worms’. In his next one-act play, On Baile's Strand, Yeats too continued to elaborate on the base of realism while reaching out to an apex of poetry drawn from Irish poetry and legend:

I am doing a play—with the following central idea—that the politic far seeing mind represented in my play of Conachar is in reality blind because the plans it makes are opposed to the plans of nature. It is always following some artificial idea. In Conchubar the idea is the greatness and prosperity of Ireland. This idea as is always the way with the artificial idea, is all but undistinguishable from mere egotism. In contrast to Conchubar is Cuchulain. He is in tune with nature. This is represented by the Sidhe being his friends.⁴¹

By the time his play was ready for production, the idea Yeats had enthusiastically outlined in this scenario had altered considerably, the framework of Fool and Blind Man taking on greater individuality than as mere foils to Conchubar and Cuchulain. The folk figures of this comic framework threaten to drown, instead of contrast with, the ‘pure aimless joy’ of Cuchulain's fight with ‘the ungovernable sea’; irony and cross-reference intellectualise the tragic folly of Cuchulain. And so, after The Golden Helmet (1908)⁴² Yeats left comedy to his two colleagues, content to provide the tragedy which ‘heightens their comedy and tragi-comedy, and grows itself more moving and intelligible from being mixed into the circumstances of the world by the circumstantial art of comedy’.⁴³ By then, too, tradition and experiment combined to lead him away from the narrow Abbey stage—its very restrictions ideal for Irish cottage scenes—⁴⁴ to the high lonely art of allusion and dance. When he next tackled the Cuchulain saga, hero and fool became one; but even At the Hawk's Well ends on ambiguity, ‘who but an idiot would praise / Dry stones in a well?’

Of the three collaborators, Lady Gregory alone retained the original one-act pattern of the ‘dwarf-dramas’ so contemptuously dismissed by Joyce. Yet Synge's three-act plays continued to celebrate the contrasting elements inherent in the earlier form while expanding and elaborating theme and personality; and with few exceptions Yeats strove to perfect and simplify in his struggle to capture ‘a moment of intense life’. But the concept of a mysterious crooning stranger urgently beckoning from cottage doorway towards a dangerous pathway into another world remained one of the haunting images of Irish theatre. While that theatre's audience, helplessly pinned between reality and wonder, would continue to swing uneasily, sometimes angrily, between laughter and tears. ‘Small talk’ did indeed become ‘knockdown argument.’

Notes

1. Quoted from Herbert Gorman's notes in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, New York, 1959, p. 129. Later, however, Joyce translated Riders to the Sea into Italian, and arranged for its production in Zurich.

2. See Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, Laying the Foundations: 1902-1904, Dolmen, Dublin, 1976 for the dates and casts of these plays; Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, eds., Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance, Proscenium Press, 1970, for Lizzie and the Tinker, a translation of McGinley's Eilis agus an Bhean Déirce; Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers (1903), Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1974, for The Twisting of the Rope, her translation of Casadh an Tsugáin.

3. As Lady Gregory points out in ‘An Craoibhin's Plays,’ Poets and Dreamers, p. 136.

4. Frank Fay's articles are collected and edited by Robert Hogan in Towards a National Theatre, Dolmen, Dublin, 1970; see Yeats's letters and the early articles of Beltaine and Samhain for the development of his theories on staging and performance.

5. The Letters of William Yeats, ed. Allan Wade, Macmillan, New York, 1955, pp. 114 and 117.

6. See his ‘Autobiography—First Draft’ in Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, Macmillan, London, 1972, pp. 72-73.

7. ‘What we wanted was to create for Ireland a theatre with a base of realism, with an apex of beauty’, Lady Gregory's notes to Damer's Gold quoted in Collected Plays, vol. I, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1971, p. 262.

8. Preface to The Land of Heart's Desire, in W. B. Yeats, Plays and Controversies, Macmillan, London, 1923, p. 299.

9. 5 April 1902, p. 5, quoted in The Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, II, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, Macmillan, London, 1975, p. 284.

10. Joseph Holloway described her performance in his journal after the first production on April 3rd: ‘a part realised with creepy realism by the tall and willowy Miss Maud Gonne, who chanted her lines with rare musical effect, and crooned fascinatingly, if somewhat indistinctly, some lyrics’, printed in Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1967, p. 17. In ‘Yeats and Ireland’, Scattering Branches, ed. Stephen Gwynn, Macmillan, London, 1940, pp. 29-30, Maud Gonne describes Yeats's rehearsals with the company.

11. The United Irishman, 5 May 1902, quoted in full in A. Norman Jeffares and A. S. Knowland, A Commentary on The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan, London, 1975, pp. 27-28.

12. Quoted by Richard Ellmann in The Identity of Yeats, Macmillan, London, 1954, pp. 295-96.

13. Holloway describes Maire nic Shiubhlaigh's performance on 27 December 1904: ‘Anything more strangely pathetic than her chanting as she leaves the cottage I have never heard. Her words sunk into one's very soul! … Of all the “Cathleens” I have seen, this was the truest embodiment. The sorrows of centuries were on her brow and in her eye, and her words pierced the heart with grief at her woe!’ (Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 51). A photograph of Sara Allgood is reproduced in Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1972, illus. no. 18 and of Lady Gregory, illus. no. 9; a further photograph of Lady Gregory with Arthur Shields as Michael Gillane is reproduced on the dust jacket of Lady Gregory's Journals Volums I Books 1-29, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1978. A photograph of Maud Gonne and the first cast is reproduced in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, Macmillan, London, 1976, p. 101; a different photograph of the same production appears in James Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, Macmillan, Toronto, 1976, plate 6.

14. Quoted in A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, p. 36.

15. Yeats's dedication to Lady Gregory of volumes One and Two of Plays for an Irish Theatre, February 1903, quoted in A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, pp. 28-29.

16. Donald T. Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1966, pp. 78-79.

17. Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre, p. 17.

18. Note to The Pot of Broth, Plays in Prose and Verse, Macmillan, London, 1922, p. 421.

19. Letters, pp. 367-368.

20. ‘The Acting at St. Teresa's Hall’, The United Irishman, 12 April 1902, reprinted in Uncollected Prose, II, pp. 285-86.

21. Letters, p. 441 and 367.

22. ‘The Acting at St. Teresa's Hall’, The United Irishman, 19 April 1902, reprinted in Uncollected Prose, II, pp. 291-292. See also Yeats's letter to F. J. Fay in Laying the Foundations, 1902-1904, pp. 17-18.

23. Although it is Riders to the Sea and Spreading the News he points to in his notes to the play in Plays in Prose and Verse, p. 421. In a letter to a Californian School, published in 1924 and reprinted from the original typescript in ‘Two Lectures on the Irish Theatre by W. B. Yeats’, Theatre and Nationalism in 20th Century Ireland, ed. Robert O'Driscoll, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1971, p. 83, Yeats attributed their deliberate choice of dialect to the qualities of the company: ‘I soon saw that their greatest success would be in comedy, or in observed tragedy; not in poetical drama, which needs considerable poetical and general culture. I had found an old Dublin pamphlet about the blind beggar, “Zozimus”, and noticed that whereas the parts written in ordinary English are badly written, certain long passages in dialect are terse and vivid. I pointed this out to Lady Gregory, and said if we could persuade our writers to use dialect, no longer able to copy the newspapers, or some second-rate English author, they would become original and vigorous. Perhaps no one reason ever drives one to anything. Perhaps I do not remember clearly after so many years; but I believe it was that thought that made me write, with Lady Gregory's help, The Pot of Broth, and Cathleen ni Houlihan. The dialect in those two plays is neither rich nor supple, for I had not the right ear, and Lady Gregory had not as yet taken down among the cottages two hundred thousand words of folklore. But they began the long series of plays in dialect that have given our theatre the greater portion of its fame’.

24. Note to Plays in Prose and Verse, 1922, and W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies, Macmillan, London, 1955, pp. 451-52.

25. ‘Cuguan’, The United Irishman, 8 November 1902, p. 3.

26. Unsigned note in The Academy and Literature, June 1904, reprinted in J. M. Synge, Prose, ed. Alan Price, Oxford University Press, London, 1966, pp. 397-98.

27. Notes written in 1906, quoted in J. M. Synge, Plays: Book I, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, Oxford University Press, London, 1968, p. xxviii.

28. ‘Le Mouvement Intellectuel Irlandais’, L'Européen, 31 May 1902, translated as ‘The Irish Literary Movement’ and published in John M. Synge, The Aran Islands and Other Writings, ed. Robert Tracy, Vintage, New York, 1962, pp. 364-65. In the same article, pp. 363-64. Synge notes the contrasting emotions evoked by Edward Martyn's The Heather Field: ‘The playwright has made of this dreamer, who comforts himself with great and chimerical hopes, a truly attractive character. He wins all our sympathy beside his brutally realistic wife.’

29. 22 October 1901, reprinted in Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Irish Literary Theatre: 1899-1901, Dolmen, Dublin, 1975, p. 103.

30. Autobiographies, pp. 439-440.

31. ‘An Craoibhin's Plays’, Poets and Dreamers, 1903; The Twisting of the Rope and other translations of Douglas Hyde's work were first published by her in this volume, and reprinted with further plays by Hyde in the Coole Edition, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1974.

32. Letters, p. 400.

33. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre 1913, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1972, p. 57.

34. In Our Irish Theatre, p. 60, Lady Gregory describes The Rising of the Moon as ‘an historical play, as my history goes, for the scene is laid in the historical time of the rising of the Fenians in the sixties. But the real fight in the play goes on in the sergeant's own mind, and so its human side makes it go as well in Oxford or London or Chicago as in Ireland itself.’ There is nothing in the text or stage directions concerning time or rebellion, but the Castle authorities considered it sufficiently incendiary to forbid the borrowing of uniforms.

35. Notes to The Rising of the Moon, quoted in Collected Plays I, p. 257.

36. When the Moon Has Set, first rejected by Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1901, remained among Synge's papers and in revised form was rejected again after his death; it was first published in Synge, Plays Book I in 1968.

37. Yeats's lecture on ‘Contemporary Irish Theatre’, edited by Robert O'Driscoll, Yeats and the Theatre, ed. Robert O'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, Macmillan, Toronto, 1975, p. 49.

38. ‘Synge to MacKenna: The Mature Years’, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, Irish Renaissance, ed. Robin Skelton and David R. Clark, Dolmen, Dublin, 1965, p. 67.

39. ‘I found the part a difficult one to master for it was completely unlike anything that I or anybody else in the company had ever played previously’. Maire nic Shiubhlaigh, The Splendid Years, Duffy, Dublin, 1955, p. 42.

40. Synge wrote to Frank Fay after the London production in 1904, ‘Miss W[alker, Maire nic Shiubhlaigh] is clever and charming in the part, but your brother is so strong he dominates the play—unconsciously and inevitably—and of course the woman should dominate’. Quoted in Synge Plays Book I, p. xx.

41. Undated statement by Yeats in Lady Gregory's hand, probably prepared in 1904 for the patent application, in the possession of the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

42. Later revised as The Green Helmet: an Heroic Farce 1910. The Player Queen, originally intended for Mrs Patrick Campbell, was not completed until 1919 when it was produced by the Stage Society in London.

43. Introduction to Fighting the Waves, Wheels and Butterflies, Macmillan, London, 1934, p. 71.

44. The Abbey stage measured fourteen feet high, twenty-one feet wide, and fifteen feet deep. Willie Fay reports, ‘All our cottage scenes were the exact dimensions of an Irish cottage—12 feet high in front, sloping down to 8 feet at the back wall, 20 feet long and 12 feet wide.’ W. G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre, Harcourt Brace, New York, 1935, p. 200.