SOURCE: Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. “Reading a Riot: The ‘Reading Formation’ of Synge's Abbey Audience.” Literature and History 13, no. 2 (autumn 1987): 219-37.

[In the following essay, Cairns and Richards argue that the nationalist ideology and mythologized nostalgia that produced the Irish Literary Revival to some extent “scripted” the ways in which the early twentieth-century Dublin audience responded to Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World.]

The Playboy ‘riots’—along with those of Hugo's Hernani, Jarry's Ubu Roi, O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars—are among the few undisputed ‘facts’ of literary history. A pleasing confirmation to the literary critics that the object of their attention has, at some time and place, actually engaged with society. The fact of the riots is even recognized in the book of that very title—The Playboy Riots—which meticulously records the dispute as it swung to and fro through the Dublin press.¹ More problematic, however, is to find any clear explanations as to the cause of the audience's hostile response to the work.

The general recognition that the response was related to outraged nationalist sensibility when confronted with this Ascendancy insult is the standard explanation and one from which we would not wish substantially to demur. But beyond this clearly perceived causal relationship between expectation and actuality there is little advance, particularly at the level of critical introductions to the plays in editions most readily available to undergraduate audiences. One of the most widely available copies of Synge's work—the Eyre Methuen Master Playwrights series of 1981—carries the T. R. Henn introduction to the Complete Plays from 1963. Henn clearly states that the Dublin audiences would have been sensitive to anything produced by the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy group of writers and acknowledges Synge's disruption of the Irish concepts, sedulously fostered in the 1890s, of the valour and virtue, piety and purity which characterized ‘the Gael’.² Any desire to know more, however, about expectations, the reasons for those expectations, and their disruption is not met. The reaction to the word ‘shift’ is acknowledged but explained as being ‘connected somehow with the idea that the very word was insulting to the womanhood of Ireland …’.³ Henn's view is that the audience were probably bewildered by the play's ‘subtle ironies’ and that their response to the offensive word was ‘no more than a catalyst for the general but indeterminate unease’.⁴

What is clearly inferred is that aesthetic ignorance of the ironies and ambivalences employed by Synge created this ‘indeterminate unease’ which then expressed itself in a manner ‘connected somehow’ to nationalist expectations. Having implicitly acknowledged the ideological determinants governing response, Henn's introduction slips this into an aesthetic frame so that the reader is left believing that if only the more subtle ironies had been appreciated then the indeterminate unease which fed the riots would not have emerged.

This assessment would not lay claim to having been received via a theorized analysis, yet its conclusion is broadly congruent with that which, we suggest, would be reached through an application of the form of textual reception theory pioneered by Hans-Robert Jauss. In his ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’,⁵ Jauss coined the term ‘horizon of expectations’ to delineate the extent to which an audience's aesthetic norms and hence, expectations, has been determined by previous literary encounters; consequently, the greater a work's disruptive effect of the audience the more one can see the ‘aesthetic distance’ between its ‘novelty’ and the audience's established norms. But, Jauss argues, the reception of a new work can result in a ‘change of horizons’ through negation of familiar experiences or through raising newly articulated experiences to the level of consciousness.⁶ The implication of the argument is clear: as the initial disruption is caused by aesthetic unfamiliarity, then increasing familiarity with the new work will result in an expansion of the horizon of expectations and the incorporation of the work within the newly drawn parameters. The reasoning here is similar to that used by Yeats in justifying the decision of the Directors of the Irish National Theatre to persevere with performing The Playboy in the teeth of violent opposition.⁷ Moreover, it was a form of justification with which both he and Lady Gregory were familiar and had appealed to in their selection of material for the performances of the fledgling Theatre.⁸

Yeats's stand on this occasion has been generally regarded by mainstream critical writers as being ‘for’ Art and ‘against’ Politics—or rather a narrow and politically bigoted Dublin audience. Some support is leant this view—and indeed the propositions of Jaussian Reception Theory—by the apparent revision in attitude of at least one erstwhile critic, Patrick Pearse, who, in February 1907, as editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, had severely criticized The Playboy. In later years he, apparently, became more appreciative of Synge's work but, as his biographer makes clear, while he might have changed his mind about the acceptability of the play others had not and on the very occasion when he praised it he was loudly heckled by persons who were still antagonistic to The Playboy.⁹

For the analyst, the value of Jauss's work is that it firmly locates meaning and reception within the framing context of the reader's literary experiences and expectations, so refining and developing Shklovsky's insistence that the work of art is ‘perceived against the background of other works of art and in association with them’.¹⁰ The limitation of the theory is that it holds too exclusively to an ‘horizon of expectations’ which is aesthetically determined, rather than acknowledging the additional ideological determinants or, more precisely, the extent to which aesthetic preconceptions are, in themselves, ideological. We must, in other words, acknowledge two, mutually interdependent historicities: the work within its literary and social context and the audience in its own time, within a system of aesthetic and ideological expectations.¹¹

This critique of ‘reception theory’ is well enough established for it not to require further formulation here—we find it fully expressed in Tony Bennett's 1982 article ‘Texts, Readers, Reading Formations’ to which we are indebted both for this paper's title and the stimulus to its composition.¹² But perhaps the most succinct acknowledgement of the value and limitation of Jauss's reception theory is provided by the French theatre semiotician, Patrice Pavis, who has written ‘What is lacking, therefore, in this theory of expectation horizon is … a semiological system sufficiently precise and structured to supply a code of the expectations as announced in the text under examination. So, rather than mutually excluding each other, the semiology of ideological codes and the reception of texts are complementary’.¹³ We would wish to agree with Pavis and to reiterate Umberto Eco's assertion that ideology is the ‘final connotation in the chain of connotations’.¹⁴

Jauss's theory of reception, then, is enhanced by an acknowledgement of the ideological ‘metatext’ which informs reception. As Louis Althusser argued, in an all too rare article on ideology and the theatre: ‘the spectator has no other consciousness than the content which unites him to the play in advance, and the development of this content in the play itself: the new result which the play produces from the self-recognition whose image and presence it is’.¹⁵ What we can then extrapolate from Althusser is that if, as in the production he observed, the directorial intention is to create a unity between spectators and stage on the basis of ‘the same spontaneously lived ideology’, then when the ideology of the play is not in accord with that of the audience, unity is an impossibility—indeed spontaneous rejection will occur.

As suggested by Pavis then, ‘The sole and narrow path available to the aesthetics of reception is that of the process of identification conceived of as the spectator's quest for identity’.¹⁶ But identity is only found, only confirmed, when, as in the case of Althusser's reported production, there is the same ‘lived ideology’. We would wish to advance the argument therefore, that the quest is for confirmation of identity, in which identity is conceived in social and ideological, rather than purely individual terms. In the case of The Playboy riots, identity—in the sense of a pre-production ideological identity—was not simply denied, it was, we will argue, contradicted. The task in hand then is to define the trans-subjective horizon—or, rather, matrix of horizons—of ideologically determined expectations of the audience and then, as advocated by Pavis, to define the semiology of that ideological code.¹⁷

The ‘overworking’ and ‘overcoding’ of the text of The Playboy on the night of its first performance resulted from the peculiar forms in which the matrices of expectation of the various sections of the audience, when overlaid, intersected and in some cases amplified, and in other cases suppressed, reaction. In seeking to clarify how and in what ways this occurred, the figure of ‘the peasant’ in particular, and the overcoding assigned to ‘the peasant’, is crucial.¹⁸ This centrality derives from the struggles for hegemony taking place in contemporary Irish society, in which the production, and the productive activation, of the succession of works which together comprised the central texts of the Literary Revival sharpened the sensitivity of individuals and of groups of individuals.

We have discussed in an earlier work¹⁹ the usefulness of synthesizing elements of the categories of Lyons,²⁰ Boyce²¹ and Watson²² in their various works to produce a Gramscian problematic of later nineteenth century Irish society. Within this structure, and against the overall background of an ethnocentric, Anglo-Saxonist discourse produced and disseminated from England, three broad groups strove against each other within Ireland—the Anglo-Irish, the Ulster Protestants and the Catholic Nationalists. Moreover, within these broad groups there was competition for overall hegemony of two opposed blocs or class alliances—Unionist and Nationalist. It is important to recognize that these struggles were at a particularly delicate stage in the 1890s and 1900s, for the peculiar balance of political, social—and hence ideological—forces within the Nationalist bloc which had been the achievement of Parnell, via his domination of the Nationalist movement, had been changed dramatically by his fall. In his final year his appeals to populism, and his attempts to avert personal and political disaster by campaigning directly in Ireland, had contributed to an accentuation of the pre-existing populism of the ideology of the broad mass of Home Rulers.²³ The consequence of this was that it became necessary henceforth for those who would seek the hegemony of the Nationalist bloc not merely to acknowledge, but to celebrate, the values of the majority of their supporters—the tenants who were the beneficiaries of the late nineteenth century Land Wars.²⁴

For politicians and writers who took their ideology from Thomas Davis and Young Ireland of the 1840s, those who were, like Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, F. H. O'Donnell and A. M. Sullivan (among others) ‘Davisites’, the smaller tenants were identical with ‘the people’. For these writers a prominent—if not too freely acknowledged—identifier of ‘the people’ was their Catholicism and also those peculiar, rurally oriented, values which in sum constituted familism—a tight nexus of practices which together helped to make stem inheritance operable and thus, through the concentration of holdings, made the survival of the tenant farmer possible.²⁵

Davisite ideology²⁶ functioned hegemonically through its inclusiveness: in principle it was non-sectarian (although its populist focus, and elements derived from that focus, made this more apparent than real), and thus members of the landowning and professional classes from the Protestant Ascendancy could—and did—participate in Nationalist campaigns. For such, as Watson has indicated, the foregrounding of ‘the peasant’ created the opportunity to present peasant and aristocrat, tenant and landlord, as part of a naturally balanced cosmology—the only disruptions to which came from the activities of the priest and the money-grubbing Catholic bourgeoisie.²⁷

During periods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the achievement of Home Rule through constitutional means looked possible, Davisite ideology was much more explicitly inclusive than at times when Home Rule seemed unattainable—precisely because of a perceived need to demonstrate to English legislators that Home Rule would not be followed by Rome Rule: the exclusion of Protestants from political power and the dispossession of the landlords.²⁸ J. S. Kelly's researches have helped to clarify the ways in which writers in the 1890s, and specifically Anglo-Irish writers, negotiated their relationship to the principal elements of the Davisite ideology. In particular he and other writers have shown how their concentration of ‘peasantoid’ and ‘Cuchullanoid’²⁹ drama was a means both of suggesting the continuing relevance of a landowning aristocracy to Irish society and, simultaneously, emphasizing the central importance of a social and intellectual elite to continued Irish cultural and social vitality.

Concentration on these areas was especially significant for Anglo-Irish Nationalist writers of the Revival precisely because pro-Union—and necessarily pro-Imperial—writers, whether in England or Ireland, in the late nineteenth century articulated a discourse of dominance on the part of Anglo-Saxons and of subservience on the part of other peoples. In this discourse the Irish were racially and culturally located to a subordinate position in the Imperial community through, amongst other elements, Arnold's typifications of ‘Celtic’ personality as feminine, irrational, impractical and childlike, and social-Darwinist stereotyping of the Irish as inferior racially to the Aryan Anglo-Saxons.³⁰ Anglo-Irish Nationalist writers in particular attempted to counter this imperial discourse by emphasizing the distinctiveness of ‘Celtic’ culture, its ‘melancholy, wit, titanism, style, unworldliness and above all natural magic’³¹ in contrast to the materialism and philistinism of English culture. Thus, in using the very term ‘Celtic’, writers of the Revival were accepting Anglo-Saxonist definitions of their culture through Anglo-Saxonist terms and were seeking to achieve resistance to Anglo-Saxonist imperial domination through the articulation of a Nationalist aesthetic which, in practice, partially reproduced (and therefore affirmed) elements of the original imperial discourse—albeit with a positive accentuation rather than the condescending, negative, accentuation of the original.

The articulation of such a discourse by the Anglo-Irish writers of the Revival was aimed at convincing English critics and politicians of the worth, dignity and longevity of Irish National identity and thus at achieving Home Rule with the minimum disruption to the social status quo. However, and still within the broad sweep of Davisite ideology, rather more robust articulations of Nationalist aesthetics were produced by the writers and dramatists of The Nation school—authors such as Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and A. M. Sullivan. For such as these, Davis's characterization of ‘the common people even though they were poor downtrodden and exploited’³² established ‘the people’ as collectively the embodiment of Ireland. Similarly, for the Gaelic Leaguers and other exclusivists ‘the peasant’ was the bedrock of Irish national identity. Thus, in the 1890s, Davisite reverence for the people, racy of the soil, was further augmented by the determination of Gaelic Leaguers to persuade the peasants to cease regarding their native language as a badge of shame and instead treasure it as the prime vehicle of nationality. For these Gaelic Leaguers it was imperative to oppose the spread of anglicization and to counter the Anglo-Saxonist image of ‘the peasant’ as a simian rural idiot whose adherence to the Irish language identified him as poor and ignorant. Kelly notes that ‘This progaganda was to be important outside the Gaelic speaking districts for it was to create the myth of the “true” Irishman. By the end of the decade the Irish-speaking countryman had become the idealized norm for many critics and woe betide the writer or dramatist who did not endorse that generalization’.³³

These features can clearly be seen in the work of the Davisite popular historian A. M. Sullivan in his The Story of Ireland.³⁴ Here, ‘the people’ are undifferentiated; whether they are townsmen or countrydwellers they possess the same attributes: nobility, chivalry and honour—particularly in contrast to the deceitfulness of the English. The Davisite notion of a noble people is not present at isolated spots in this work—it provides the entire underpinning and informs virtually every page. What is particularly noteworthy, however, is the way in which, by the time Sullivan begins to deal with the period of the nineteenth century (his narrative ends with the abortive Rising of 1867), the mass of the ‘Irish people’ makes its first appearance at the time of Emancipation. For Sullivan,

Emmet's insurrection riveted the Union chain on Ireland. It was for a time the death-blow of public life in the country. When political action reappeared a startling change, a complete revolution had been wrought … Hitherto political Ireland meant the Protestant minority of the population alone … But now the Catholic millions themselves appeared on the scene to plead and agitate their own cause, and alongside the huge reality of their power, the exclusively Protestant political fabric sunk into insignificance, and as such disappeared forever.³⁵

The content of such Davisite articulations of resistive discourses reveals an inherently more antagonistic attitude towards the imperial power than that displayed in Anglo-Irish Nationalist discourses, in which there is an underlying affirmation of central elements of the imperial discourse. Davisite writing—and particularly Sullivan's crucial text—by foregrounding the honourable behaviour of the Irish and the constant perfidy of the English, displays an ambivalence of approach towards the possibility of attaining Home Rule through parliamentary means which served hegemonic inclusiveness by offering accommodation to supporters both of parliamentarism and the less obdurate of the hard-line exclusivist groups. One further element wherein Davisite articulations of resistive discourses differed fundamentally from Anglo-Irish discourses is in the matter of the identification of the ‘Celts’ in ethnocentric Anglo-Saxonist writing, and particularly that of Arnold, with feminine traits and hence with irremediable structured-in subservience.³⁶ Davisite writers—but even more markedly Irish-Irish writers such as D. P. Moran—treated such typifications with great seriousness and it is clear from Moran's writings in particular that femininity was indisputably and necessarily a badge of subservience, as for example in this comment:

On all sides one sees only too much evidence that the people are secretly content to be a conquered race, they have not the honesty to admit it. Even the pride that frequently dignifies failure is not there. There is nothing masculine in the character; and when the men do fall into line, with green banners overhead, and shout themselves hoarse, is it not rather a feminine screech, a delirious burst of defiance on a background of sluggishness and despair?³⁷

In attempting to counter imperial structured-in dominance the works of Nationalist ideologists such as Sullivan were particularly significant, because, in the reading materials of the Irish National and Intermediate Schools, the historical existence of the Irish people was never referred to: the materials, though drawn up in Ireland in the early nineteenth century, were addressed to an imagined audience which clearly consisted of English children.³⁸ Protest about the lack of acknowledgement of Irish identity was to fall on deaf ears until the beginning of the twentieth century when the teaching of Irish History was very cautiously introduced into Irish Intermediate Schools.³⁹ Sullivan's text, then, was particularly important because, in the absence of official acknowledgement of any necessity for the teaching of Irish History, and thus of any necessity for texts on Irish History, The Story of Ireland filled the vacuum, being circulated by the libraries of Christian Brothers' Schools and read aloud extensively in country districts.⁴⁰ Together with other Davisite texts, including Duffy's Four Years of Irish History and Young Ireland and the sentimental shamrockery of the Harp of Tara Song Book and the Brian Boru Song Book,⁴¹ these works supplied the parameters within which, blending genuinely popular elements and commercially and politically produced materials, Irish Nationalists sought to orientate their ideas of an Irish identity through a view of its past and thus the roots of its present—but always in confrontation and negotiation with the imperial structure-in-dominance.

We have previously suggested that, no less than the Irish-Irelanders, the exclusivists, the broad, Davisite, mass of the Nationalist class alliance had by 1907 reached the position that all would-be Nationalists must ‘conform to the demands of the ideology which cemented their bloc together’.⁴² By 1907 then, Davisite ideology was itself becoming increasingly sectarian and exclusivist—a tendency unchecked, up until 1906, by any possibility of gaining Home Rule through parliamentary means, given the domination of both Commons and Lords at Westminster by Unionists, and the still shaky unity of the Irish parliamentarians. All in all, this meant that the politicians—and the press organs which supported their individual factions—the Freeman's Journal (supporting the Redmondites), The Irish Daily Independent, (supporting T. M. Healy and his small band) and The Irish People (the paper of W. O'Brien),⁴³ struck rather more robust (i.e. more openly pro-Catholic) attitudes, particularly on the education question with its centrality to Irish Catholic religious life, than would necessarily have been the case had the Liberals been in office.

In essence we are suggesting that although numerically small, the ideological influence of the Irish-Ireland groups was placing pressure upon the content and form of the hegemonic ideology of the Nationalist class-alliance—emphasizing as Moran had in The Leader, the popular Catholicism of Ireland and that the Irish were, ‘de facto, a Catholic Nation’.⁴⁴ Thus, though the ideas of what constituted Irish cultural identity were negotiated through terms ‘given’ by the discourse of the ruling, imperial, class alliance, the withdrawal of the immediate possibility of achieving a species of independence through parliamentarianism, loosened the authority of the Irish Nationalist parliamentarians and partially inhibited their ability to augment and reproduce the hegemonic ideology of the Nationalist class-alliance, to the extent that distinctive new—and less inclusivist—elements were injected into the Davisite ideological corpus.

II

The matrix of expectations outlined above, in which it had become a prerequisite of Nationalist writing that the common people should be represented as the embodiment of the true Nation, was to be disrupted by Synge's work, but the full sign of that disruption is only to be grasped if seen in the theatrical context of those works which confirmed expectations and had been positively received precisely because of their confirmatory power. In his Life Story of an Old Rebel⁴⁵ the life long revolutionary John Denvir records his work with a theatre group entitled the ‘Emerald Minstrels’, whose ideological antecedents were, Denvir announces, ‘the teaching of Young Ireland and the “Spirit of the Nation”’.⁴⁶ Given that the declared objective was to cultivate Irish culture in all its forms and ‘above all, Irish Nationality’, the chosen set for the productions is striking in its choice of the most potent sign of ‘Irishness’, namely the peasant cottage. The production was entitled Terence's Fireside: or The Irish Peasant at Home and in keeping with this homely image the set confirmed the Irish idyll. Denvir wrote ‘We had a drop scene representing the Lower Lake of Killarney. When it was raised it disclosed the interior of the living room of a comfortable Irish homestead, with the large projecting open chimney, the turf fire on the hearth, and the usual pious and patriotic pictures prior to such an interior—Terence's Fireside’.⁴⁷ The production, which was essentially a series of turns held together by the fiction that this was in-house entertainment of the typical Irish home, was explicitly nationalistic. The ‘Shan Van Vocht’ was the finale to the first half and, to confirm the determining effect this would have on potential audiences, Denvir reported that ‘The services of the “Emerald Minstrels” were in great demand, and were always cheerfully given for Catholic, National and charitable objects’.⁴⁸ Indeed, as Denvir tellingly remarked: ‘our own people mostly furnished our audiences’.⁴⁹

As Catholic Nationalists, Denvir's ‘own people’ would have an horizon of expectations which, as outlined above, allowed the signification of the Irish rural community only in the most positive light; it would, in Althusser's terms, be expressive of ‘the spectator's consciousness—for the very reason that the spectator has no other consciousness than the content which unites him to the play in advance …’. Given this shared ideology the response to the ‘Emerald Minstrels’ is as would be expected: ‘They were always received with great enthusiasm’. Denvir records that ‘Mr. Calderwood, Secretary of the Concert Hall, Lord Nelson Street, Dublin, … gave us several engagements for the “Saturday Evening Concerts” (and) told us he was well pleased to have in the town a company like ours, upon whom he could always rely for a successful entertainment’.⁵⁰Terence's Fireside was openly and intently nationalistic—with all the fervour of an amateur troupe, but it was in no sense an isolated example of theatre used to confirm the Catholic Nationalist audience in its ideological identity. We have already indicated that the Gaelic League had from its inception sought to revalue the peasant and the peasants' language in the eyes of Nationalists and from the 1890s this foregrounding of ‘the peasant’ as the guarantor of Gaelic purity was to be at the heart of Gaelic centrality to the Nationalist movement.

Hyde was both polemicist and playwright and it is his play The Twisting of the Rope⁵¹ which consciously confirmed the Catholic Nationalist audience's ideological identity and, most strikingly, given the subject of our paper, provides a significant anticipation of The Playboy's provocative variation on a similar theme: the community's response to the disruptive presence of the stranger.

Hyde's play, written in two days in August 1900 on the basis of a scenario provided by Yeats, was performed at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre, in the October of 1901 by members of the Gaelic League Amateur Dramatic Society with Hyde himself in the principal role. The plot is simplicity itself. Set during a dance in ‘A farmer's house in Munster a hundred years ago’ the play dramatizes the community's concerted efforts to exclude the stranger Hanrahan and ensure that Oona, the girl on whom he lavishes attention, remains within the community as the intended of Sheamus. Far from being revealed as snivelling and cowardly, incapable of incorporating the vitality of the Playboy figure, Hyde's peasants are intelligent and resourceful. Hanrahan's bragging, egotistical personality is easily enticed into the twisting of the rope, in the process of which he backs through the open door which is then closed to effect his exclusion. The play closes with Sheamus' confirmation of the value of community, ‘isn't it a fine thing for a man to be listening to the storm outside, and himself quiet and easy beside the fire?’⁵²

Hyde could be perhaps expected to record that ‘the audience loved it’ but his authorial pride is supported by Synge who commented on the production in an article on the Literary Revival published, in French, in L'European of 31 May 1902. It was, said Synge, ‘une petite piece charmante’. But of more interest than his comments on the play are his observations of the composition of the audience and its response to the production as a whole. The evening featured, as its opening, a collaborative effort of Yeats and George Moore entitled Diarmuid and Grainne which was performed by an English troupe, Mr. F. R. Benson's Shakespearean Company. As Synge observed, this piece was greeted by the young ladies of the League jabbering away in bad Irish to their pale, enthusiastic, and equally improficient male counterparts. Yet in the interval of the play the gallery spontaneously broke out into a rendition of Irish popular songs—in Irish. As Synge observed, the auditorium shuddered with emotion, many people broke into tears and the evening continued in the atmosphere of a vibrant emotion; the soul of the people had entered the theatre.

The Nationalist politics of the audience has been well documented. The Freeman's Journal of 22 October 1901 recorded that ‘Every Gaelic Leaguer, every student of O'Growney, everyone interested in the old tongue who could elbow his way into the theatre was there last night, and the enthusiasm was tremendous’. As the politician and literary man Stephen Gwynn reported in The Fortnightly Review, the reaction to Hyde's play was ecstatic:

… the words were caught up almost before they were out of the speaker's mouth; and I heard from behind me shouts in Irish of encouragement to the performers in the dance. I never was in an audience so amusing to be among; there was a magnetism in the air. In the entractes, a man up in the gallery with a fine voice, sang song after song in Irish, the gallery joining in the chorus, and an attentive house applauding at the end. One began to realise what the Gaelic League was doing. …⁵³

What it was indeed doing was consciously constructing an aesthetic of ideological confirmation in which audiences—already committed to Nationalist politics, unproblematically read the signifier—peasant cottage, as signifying the Celtic values which Hyde's ‘manifesto’ of the League had already proclaimed. The danger, as Stephen Gwynn saw it in 1906, was that ‘We a [ … ]

This then was the matrix of expectations into which Synge projected his ‘alternative’ vision of the peasantry. It is not the occasion to elaborate on Synge's highly individual concept of the peasant's purity of passion, rather, our objective is to delineate the horizon of essentially negative expectations which Synge's work had constructed prior to The Playboy riots, and indeed which would have pre-determined audiences towards a reading of the play which excluded any intended comic ambiguity on the part of Synge.⁵⁴

The reactions to Synge's The Shadow of the Glen in 1903 included the protest withdrawal of the support of Maud Gonne and Douglas Hyde from the theatre group but most notable, from the standpoint of our analysis, was the reaction of Arthur Griffith, the Editor of The United Irishman, leading figure of Cumann Na nGaedheal (an intended umbrella movement for all culturally inclined Nationalists) and himself an extremely active Nationalist. At the heart of Griffith's condemnation of Synge was that he was ‘as utterly a stranger to the Irish character as any Englishman’, the consequence being that the ‘truth’ of the Irish woman's loveless marriage has been fraudulently presented: ‘sometimes the woman lives in bitterness—sometimes she dies of a broken heart—but she does not go away with the Tramp’.⁵⁵ Griffith's attacks on Synge would certainly have helped condition Nationalist audiences in their responses to any uncertainties in the playwright's work and Yeats made the point unequivocally in 1908: ‘The performance of Mr. Synge's Shadow of the Glen started a quarrel with the extreme National party … and from that on has attacked almost every play produced at our theatre, and the suspicion it managed to arouse among the political clubs against Mr. Synge especially led a few years later to the organized attempt to drive The Playboy of the Western World from the stage’.⁵⁶

The Nationalist aesthetic espoused by Griffith went further than condemnation; in the form of a satire on Synge's work it actually produced a model of what Nationalists expected of those authors who dramatized ‘the peasant’. The ‘play’(let) entitled In a Real Wicklow Glen was presented under the pseudonym of ‘Conn’ (possibly Griffith himself) and while maintaining the outlines of Synge's plot, this is done in narrative, for this Norah has finally and happily accepted her marriage. The main thrust of the work's concern is the confirmation of piety and service articulated by the ‘very old woman in a snowy cap’ who, as the playlet opens, is sat outside ‘A small thatched cottage’; the set suggesting what the play confirms, as did Terence's Fireside and The Twisting of the Rope, that this is ‘a real Wicklow Glen’. The heart of the play is Norah's encounter with her sweetheart of ten years ago who, since her marriage—one which has clearly been entered into for economics—has turned to drink. When Norah, distraught at the degenerate state of her old sweetheart, asks him to give up the drink for her sake, he turns, ‘with both arms out’ and says ‘Give me a kiss an' I will’. The reaction of this ‘Nationalist’ Norah is exemplary: ‘How dare you insult me, John Kavanagh. Ye coward. Ye know I am a married woman. You will never see my face again with my will’. The distraught and rejected lover is consoled by the old woman whose concluding homily, baldly paraphrased, is that, based on her own experiences, the best thing he can do is give up drink and apply himself to making money, so that when Norah's elderly husband dies he will not be only available, but also financially and physically attractive. Clearly taken with the scenario he falls to his knees and asks for the old woman's blessing. She kisses his forehead and the play concludes.⁵⁷

From a modern perspective the play is probably most striking for the way in which it places a cynical materialism against the honesty of passion in Synge's work but, as intended at the moment of publication, it presented an absolute and rigid morality as the peasant actuality in which happiness could be indefinitely delayed because, unless that happiness were found within the framework of Christian morality, then, indeed, it was not happiness but degeneracy.

What is clearly established by knowledge of ‘popular’ works such as Terence's Fireside or more consciously ‘cultural’ products such as The Twisting of the Rope, is that a broad based genre of the peasant play had emerged, which was inextricably and overtly linked with Nationalist expectations. In his book Genre Stephen Neale quotes Jean-Louis Lautrat to the effect that a genre model only exists as a ‘memorial metatext’, audiences consequently operating with ‘sets of expectations’.⁵⁸ The expectations satisfied within the genre of the peasant play are clearly those confirming Nationalist politics at a time of cultural struggle. As Yuri Lotman argues ‘culture requires unity’⁵⁹ and this unity comes about when a culture creates a model of itself: ‘The model defines the unified, the artificially schematized image, that is raised to the level of a cultural unity. When imposed onto the reality of this or that culture, it exerts a powerful regulating influence, preordaining the construction of culture, introducing order, and eliminating contradiction’.⁶⁰

Where The Playboy disturbed audiences is that it confirmed their matrix of expectations in terms of its iconography but simultaneously disrupted expectations in its thematic construction. The programme which the company distributed on its British tour in the spring of 1906 made a series of declarations as to their dedication to accuracy. The players ‘are all familiar with the ways of the Irish peasantry’ and now eagerly desire ‘to put upon the stage the actual life and aims of the peasants they have so carefully studied in their native land’.⁶¹ The claim to vraisemblance is, in Todorov's terms, the ‘attempt to make us believe it conforms to reality’⁶² and this is developed even further in the programme note on ‘Scenery and Properties’, which lays claim to an almost anthropological accuracy. The reality of attitude and action, however, was not judged to be ideologically accurate.

Synge's Riders to the Sea, upon which such attention to detail had been lavished was, in fact, the opening play in the 1907 double-bill which premiered The Playboy, the two plays sharing one set which was ‘the exact dimension 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’.⁶³ But, while Riders to the Sea with its anthropologically exact properties and set was listened to ‘attentively’ and brought ‘long and appreciative applause’, The Playboy was registered by the Abbey's ‘barometer’ of public reaction—Joseph Holloway—as ‘not a truthful or just picture of the Irish peasants …’⁶⁴ and we would wish to suggest that this was centrally because of the presentation of ‘woman’.

Joseph Lee, among other authors, has remarked on the prudery of post-Famine Catholic sexual morality⁶⁵ but whilst he has commented on the particular role assigned to married women in Irish society in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, in terms reminiscent of Arensberg's and Kimball's observations, and whilst he has emphasized the intense patriarchalism and corresponding expectation of female subservience and submissiveness, he has not expanded upon these perceptive observations. We would wish to augment his points with supporting material from the same collection of essays⁶⁶ and other material⁶⁷ to suggest that the almost universal outcry in the Dublin press against Synge's portrayals of women in both The Shadow of the Glen, and in The Playboy, derived from that ideological/cultural structure of post-famine Irish society labelled by Arensberg and Kimball ‘familism’. Lee suggests that within the families of post-Famine tenant farmers the economic and social status of women underwent a change from pre-Famine positions, such that, after the Famine, women were much more tightly controlled and enclosed—physically and mentally.⁶⁸ The focus of life, particularly for married women, was the home and hearth. Moreover, the need for sexual restraint—required to sustain the operation of stem inheritance—enjoined an attitude of mind in which sex was ‘for all practical purposes equated with sin’⁶⁹ and in which the overt demonstration of sexual attraction or affection was regarded with horror, an attitude of mind reproduced and endorsed by the particular form in which late nineteenth century Irish Catholicism was practised.

If we accept the broadly compatible hypotheses of Lee⁷⁰ and MacMahon⁷¹ regarding the relative ideological and cultural homogeneity of late nineteenth century Irish rural and urban society, and particularly if we bear in mind that in reality the most significant class in Ireland, the ‘national class’⁷², depended upon the operation of stem inheritance and associated familism, then the passions aroused by Synge's portrayals of peasant women are readily explicable. Not only are all Synge's women—significantly other than those in Riders to the Sea—lively, strong characters rather than submissive, but Nora, Pegeen and even the Widow Quin⁷³ deny male authority in the central and vital matter of whom they shall be married to and express a wistful and at times eager curiosity about the physical aspects of their already irregular relationships with members of the opposite sex. It would be our argument then, that whatever local, Aran, variations from this stereotype there might have been—and in some ways it is possible to envisage the partial survival of pre-Famine patterns of life and marital relationships on the Islands⁷⁴—nevertheless, for Nationalist audiences and readers the ‘peasant’ had become an abstract symbol or signifier of enormous importance in the struggle to constitute an Irish identity.

The audience for that first night of The Playboy has been described in many memoirs and reconstructions. Hunt and Flannery's writings⁷⁵ make it clear that it was not a representative cross-section of Dublin's population which patronized the Abbey. Those with low incomes (either workmen or members of the lower reaches of the professional and clerical classes) were initially unlikely to have been Abbey playgoers, for until October 1906 the Theatre's patroness, Annie Horniman, had strongly opposed making 6d. seats available in order to try to keep the letting value of the Theatre, when it was not in use by the Irish National Theatre Society, as high as possible. This had been criticized by both D. P. Moran, the Editor of The Leader and a virulent exclusivist Nationalist,⁷⁶ and his rival Arthur Griffith—who were in any case hostile to her—as mere snobbery, but whatever her motives the potential audience was necessarily restricted thereby. As Flannery makes clear, the Theatre had had a hard time surviving, with thin audiences during its 1905 and 1906 seasons, and had been totally dependent on Miss Horniman's subventions. The Abbey's audiences were, ironically, just beginning to pick up by January 1907, thanks to the success of Boyle's The Building Fund, which ran until 1 December 1906, and a belated switch in seat pricing policy. Flannery labels Boyle's plays less ‘crude peasant satires’,⁷⁷ while Hunt, rather more charitably, suggests that The Building Fund was ‘a thoroughly prosaic well-made play of country life, providing easily acceptable entertainment’;⁷⁸ that is, it was acceptable because in its productive activation it confirmed rather than disturbed Nationalist matrices of expectation.

Interestingly then, the audience at the Abbey both numerically and in terms of its social composition had changed markedly just before The Playboy was put on. Moran had protested in The Leader that Miss Horniman's previous pricing policy had placed ‘the Theatre outside the sphere of utility of the Gaelic League’.⁷⁹ The redress of that policy meant that members of the Gaelic League were much in evidence on the first night in the cheaper, pit seats as we know from the researches of Berrow, Hunt and Flannery. Furthermore, we know that a limited number of the Anglo-Irish patrons of the Theatre were present—but they were far outweighed in numbers by an audience which was, from all the evidence, closely similar to those which had enthusiastically received at different times The Building Fund and The Twisting of the Rope.

Thus, in terms of the reading formation of that small portion of the potential Irish audience who attended the first night of Synge's Playboy on Saturday, 27 January 1907,⁸⁰ we can suggest that the most influential lines of discourse which would comprise their matrices of expectation, and which would provide the parameters within which a new text would be productively activated were, firstly, the derogatory Anglo-Saxonist discourse of the English press and of the formal texts of the only recently reformed Elementary and Intermediate education systems, and secondly, the essentially oppositional discourses of the Davisites and the more hard-line Irish-Ireland groups in which the symbol of the peasant on the one hand stood for the antiquity, dignity, resource and distinctiveness of the Irish race⁸¹—and simultaneously the subservient status of the peasant woman stood as a guarantee for the masculinity of the Irish race and the durability of the Irish tenant's accommodations with his social and economic situation.

In coming into the Theatre on that Saturday night in January 1907 then, the audience would be familiar with three modes of portraying the peasant: firstly, the ‘traditional’ (i.e. Anglo-Saxonist inspired) stage Irishman, Paddy-with-his-pig; secondly, a more refined version of the stage Irishman of which Boucicault's is the archetype, in which peasant life is ‘sanitized’, as in Terence's Fireside or Boyle's The Building Fund; thirdly, the new type of peasant-centred drama which was being pioneered by the Gaelic League at its Feisanna and its annual Oireachtas of which Hyde's Twisting of the Rope was the pioneer. [ … ]

In this context it is significant that Synge had already written plays which had been productively activated within two different and opposed frameworks—The Shadow of the Glen to a derogatory, Anglo-Saxonist framework, in Riders to the Sea to an acceptable peasant-as-hero framework. The problem, therefore for the audience of to which matrix of discourse the play should be located was already present. It was made more difficult by the practice—already pioneered by Yeats—that was followed by using a play known to be acceptable, Riders to the Sea, as the introductory work on the programme.

We know that on that night Riders to the Sea was received with acclamation,⁸² and when the curtain was raised for Act I of The Playboy it revealed, as we have described, the set used by the previous play, a set optimised for realism. Initially, the audience was quiet and attentive. At this point, we would argue, members of the audience were attempting a productive activation of The Playboy within the mode of peasant portrayal—and hence within the matrix of expectations—which they had had so recently validated by Riders to the Sea and in the previous month's performances of The Building Fund. Until half way through Act II, press, biographical and autobiographical information makes it reasonably clear that confusion was the preponderant element in the audience's reaction to The Playboy, with applause and laughter scattered through Act I.⁸³ The Second Act, however, even on that first night, seems to mark the point at which the more ‘active’ members of the audience had decided upon a productive activation of the play within a matrix similar to that of The Shadow of the Glen rather than that of Riders to the Sea.⁸⁴

All in all then, even before the commencement of Act III, the particular form of the production and staging given to The Playboy left Nationalists within the audience with only one matrix within which they could place and productively activate the text—a framework which, in their own terms, was subversive of their oppositional views of peasant man as nature's nobleman and of peasant woman as pious, virtuous and submissive. The presence of active Gaelic Leaguers, as we have noted, is documented,⁸⁵ and in retrospect their reactions to the play were almost inevitable. The arguments started before the play had finished and continued for some time after the performance and, we would assert, those arguments were based upon the continuing determination of the intellectuals in the Nationalist class-alliance to oppose yet another stereotypification of the Irish peasant as Paddy the simian, the brutal, the unfit for Home Rule.

Perhaps ironically, having regard to his later recantation of this verdict, the view of Patrick Pearse in An Claidheamh Soluis on the general impact of the riots is the most apposite one. For in saying that ‘for Anglo-Irish Drama—it is the beginning of the end’,⁸⁶ Pearse was correct in seeing it as terminating the attempts of the ‘Anglo-Irish Nationalists’ to inscribe for themselves a leading position within the Nationalist class-alliance.

Notes

1. R. Kilroy, The Playboy Riots, Dublin: Dolmen 1971.

2. J. M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, (Intr. T. R. Henn), London: Eyre Methuen, 1981, p. 60 and A. N. Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature, Macmillan History of Literature, Dublin: Macmillan/Gill and Macmillan, 1982, p. 254 et. seq. For a critique of this approach see G. J. Watson, Irish Identity And The Literary Revival, London: Croom Helm, 1979, p. 64.

3. T. R. Henn, Op. Cit., pp. 60-61.

4. Ibid., p. 61.

5. H. R. Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’ in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Transl. T. Bahti), Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982, pp. 3-45.

6. Ibid., p. 25.

7. See R. Kilroy, Op. Cit., p. 81, et. seq.

8. Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre, Coole Edition, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972, p. 63.

9. R. Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, London: Faber & Faber, 1979, p. 169. See also the similar opinions on The Playboy of Thomas MacDonagh, Pearse's assistant at St. Enda's. Macdonagh felt that the play had largely been accepted as a comedy by 1910, Edd and Eileen Parks, Thomas MacDonagh: The Man, The Patriot, The Writer, Athens Ga.: University of Georgia Press, pp. 118-119.

10. Cited by H. R. Jauss, Op. Cit., p. 17.

11. Patrice Pavis, ‘The Aesthetics of Theatrical Reception’, in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982, p. 70.

12. T. Bennett, ‘Texts, Readers, Reading Formations’, Literature and History, Vol. 9, No. 2, Autumn 1983, pp. 214-224.

13. Pavis, Op. Cit., p. 71.

14. Cited in Michael Hays, ‘Suggestions About the Social Origins of Semiotic Practice in the Theatre, with the example of Alphonse Daudet's Arlesienne’, Modern Drama, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, 1981, p. 368.

15. Louis Althusser, ‘The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzo and Brecht’, in For Marx, London: Verso Books, 1979, pp. 150-151.

16. Pavis, Op. Cit., p. 89.

17. Ibid., p. 72.

18. V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, (Transl. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik), New York: Seminar Press, 1973, p. 72.

19. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘The Teaching of Anglo-Irish Literature: An Interdisciplinary Approach’, Unpublished Paper, Conference of the International association for the study of Anglo-Irish Literature, Graz, 1984.

20. F. S. L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, London: Oxford University Press, 1979.

21. D. G. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, London: Croom Helm, 1982.

22. G. J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, London: Croom Helm, 1979.

23. See J. S. Kelly, unpublished Ph. D. thesis, ‘The Political, Intellectual and Social background to the Irish literary Revival to 1901’, University of Cambridge, 1971, p. 61, and also J. S. Kelly, ‘The Fall of Parnell and the Rise of Irish Literature: an Investigation’, in P. J. Drudy (ed.) Anglo-Irish Studies, Vol. (ii), 1976, pp. 1-23, pp. 10-11.

24. There is a useful review of the literature to date on Irish agrarian class structures in the later nineteenth century in L. P. Curtis Jnr., ‘On Class and Class Conflict in the Land War’, Irish Economic and Social History, Vol. VIII, 1981, pp. 86-94.

25. On ‘familism’ see C. M. Arensberg and S. T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, 2nd ed. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1968, pp. 140-152. See also the recent discussion of ‘The Irish Stem Family’ by D. Fitzpatrick (‘Irish Farming Families before the First World War’ pp. 339-374, P. Gibbon and C. Curtin (‘Irish Farm Families: Facts and Fantasies’, pp. 375-380), A. Varley (‘“The Stem Family in Ireland” Reconsidered’, pp. 381-392) and P. Gibbon and P. Curtin (‘Some Observations on “The Stem Family in Ireland Reconsidered”’ pp. 393-395), in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 25 No. 2, April 1983.

26. See D. G. Boyce, Op. Cit., p. 231, et. seq.

27. G. J. Watson, Op. Cit., pp. 105-107.

28. See M. Bourgeois, John Millington Synge and The Irish Theatre, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965 (reprint of the 1913 Edn.), p. 203 et. seq.

29. See S. O'Tuama, ‘Synge and the Idea of a National Literature’, in M. Harmon (ed.) Synge Centenary Papers, Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972, pp. 1-17, p. 2.

30. For a discussion of these issues see David Cairns and Shaun Richards ‘Discourses of Opposition and Resistance in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Ireland’, Text and Context, Autumn, 1987, (forthcoming).

31. J. S. Kelly, ‘The Political, Social and Intellectual Background to the Irish Literary Revival to 1901’, p. 187. See also G. Sigerson ‘Irish Literature: Its Origin, Environment and Influence’ in ‘Addressess by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, Dr. George Sigerson and Dr. Douglas Hyde’, The Revival of Irish Literature, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894, pp. 61-114, p. 66.

32. Thomas Davis in The Nation, 13 July 1844, cited in J. S. Kelly, Ibid., p. 6.

33. Ibid., pp. 200-201.

34. A. M. Sullivan, The Story of Ireland: A Narrative of the History of Ireland from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time Written for the Youth of Ireland: Dublin: ‘The Nation’, n. d. [1867?].

35. Ibid., pp. 542-543.

36. For the idea of structured-in dominance see T. Bennett, ‘Popular Culture and Divided Territory’, Social History Society Newsletter, Autumn 1981, pp. 5-6.

37. D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland, 2nd edn. Dublin: J. Duffy; M. H. Gill, The Leader, n. d. p. 6.

38. See F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since The Famine, London: Fontana/Collins, 1971, p. 89.

39. P. Callan, ‘Irish History in Irish National Schools’, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Education Conference of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland, 1980, p. 32, E. T. Whelan, ‘Primary School Readers in the Nineteenth Century’, in Oideas, Vol. XIX, pp. 38-50 and J. M. Goldstrom, The Social Content of Education: 1800-1870, Dublin: Irish University Press, 1972, passim.

40. See J. Pope-Hennessy, ‘What do the Irish Read?’ The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 15, June 1884, pp. 920-932 and M. Bromage ‘Image of Nationhood’, Eire/Ireland, Vol. 3, No. 13, Autumn 1968, p. 13.

41. J. Pope-Hennessy, Loc. Cit., Anon. ‘From the Study Chair, “What Our Country Folk Read”’, New Ireland Review, Vol. I, No. 1, March 1894, pp. 65-6 and P. J. Hannon, ‘Peasant Thinkers and Students’, in Ibid., Vol. XV, No. 6, 1901, pp. 364-373.

42. David Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘The Teaching of Anglo-Irish Literature: An Interdisciplinary Approach’, p. 7.

43. See J. M. Brown, The Press in Ireland: A Survey and a Guide, Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1937, pp. 15-99.

44. D. P. Moran in The Leader, 10 August 1901. Cited in D. G. Boyce, Op. Cit., p. 243.

45. J. Denvir, Life Story of an Old Rebel, Dublin: Irish University Press, 1972.

46. Ibid., p. 118.

47. Ibid., p. 120.

48. Ibid., p. 122.

49. Idem.

50. Idem.

51. D. Hyde, ‘Casadh An tSugain’, translated as ‘The Twisting of the Rope’, Samhain, No. 1, October 1901. Reprinted in Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers: Studies and translations from the Irish, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1974, pp. 139-148.

52. D. Hyde in Lady Gregory. Op. Cit.

53. Cited in R. Hogan and J. Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History, The Irish Literary Theatre, 1899-1901, Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1975, p. 113.

54. Cited in R. Hogan and J. Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History Vol. III. The Abbey Theatre, The Years of Synge: 1905-1909, Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978, p. 119.

55. Cited in R. Hogan and J. Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History Vol. II. Laying the Foundations 1902-1904, Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1976, p. 79.

56. W. B. Yeats, Explorations, London: Macmillan, 1962, p. 114.

57. Reproduced in R. Hogan and J. Kilroy, The Modern Irish Drama: A Documentary History Vol. II, Laying the Foundations 1902-1904, p. 148.

58. S. Neale, Genre, London: British Film Institute, 1980, p. 51.

59. Yu. M. Lotman and B. Uspensky, ‘On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture’, New Literary History, Vol. IX, Part 2, 1978, p. 227.

60. Idem.

61. Ann Saddlemyer (ed.), Theatre Business, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982, p. 318.

62. Cited by Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, p. 139.

63. H. Berrow, ‘Eight Nights in The Abbey’, in M. Harmon, Op. Cit., pp. 75-87, p. 75.

64. H. Berrow, Loc. Cit, p. 77.

65. J. Lee, ‘Women and The Church Since the Famine’, in M. MacCurtain and D. O'Corrain (eds.), Women in Irish Society: the Historical Dimension, Dublin: Arlen House, 1978, pp. 37-45.

66. In particular, P. Redlich, ‘Women and the Family’, in Ibid., pp. 82-91 and G. O'Tuathaigh ‘The Role of women in Ireland under the New English Order’, in Ibid., pp. 26-36.

67. J. C. Messenger ‘Sex and Repression in an Irish Community’ in D. S. Marshall and R. C. Suggs (eds.), Human Sexual Behavior, New York: Basic Books, 1971, pp. 3-37.

68. J. Lee, Loc. Cit, p. 39 et. seq.

69. Ibid., p. 40.

70. J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848-1918, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973, p. 42 et. seq.

71. J. A. MacMahon, ‘The Catholic Clergy and the Social Question in Ireland, 1891-1916’, Studies, Vol. 70, No. 280, 1981, pp. 263-288.

72. D. McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 182.

73. See W. G. Fay, ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ in E. H. Mikhail (ed.), J. M. Synge: Interviews and Recollections, London: Macmillan, 1977, p. 49.

74. See G. O'Tuathaigh, Loc. Cit., p. 28.

75. See H. Hunt, The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979, pp. 32-83, especially p. 62 ff. and J. W. Flannery, ‘High Ideals and the Reality of the Marketplace: The Financial Record of the Early Abbey Theatre’, Studies, Vol. LXXI, 1982, pp. 246-69.

76. On Moran's criticism of the Abbey's pricing policy see J. W. Flannery, Op. Cit., p. 255 and on the antagonism of Griffith and Moran see J. J. Horgan, Parnell to Pearse, Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1948, p. 111.

77. J. W. Flannery, Op. Cit., p. 256.

78. H. Hunt, Op. Cit., p. 64.

79. See H. Hunt, Op. Cit., p. 59; see also A. Saddlemyer, op. cit. pp. 150-151.

80. R. Kilroy in his Playboy Riots, Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1971, has provided a selection of contemporary critical and journalistic responses to the reception of The Playboy in the week of its performance and for some time after, concentrating on responses in the Dublin press. We have, however, chosen not to draw extensively on this material—apart from the instances relating to the critiques of Synge's female characters. We suggest that the productive activation of The Playboy, by its audiences after the Dublin press had published its reviews of the Saturday performance on the following Monday, 29 January 1907, was partially in response to those reviews, and in particular that the scope for locating the play to alternative matrices of expectations had been virtually removed. See Freeman's Journal, 29 January 1907 in R. Kilroy, Op. Cit., pp. 7-10. See also the very useful review of the reaction of the Gaelic league to the play in D. Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language, London: Macmillan, 1979, p. 246 et. seq.

81. See J. S. Kelly, ‘The Political, Intellectual and Social Background to the Irish Literary Revival to 1901’, p. 203.

82. H. Berrow, Op. Cit., p. 75.

83. W. G. Fay in E. H. Mikhail, Op. Cit., p. 49.

84. H. Berrow, Op. Cit., p. 76. In later performances, Old Mahon's condemnation of Christy as ‘a dirty stuttering lout’ seemed to mark the point of productive activation. See R. Kilroy, Op. Cit., pp. 65-68.

85. See D. Kiberd, Op. Cit., p. 246. Kiberd's comments on the fate of an English touring company in Taum, Co. Galway who, during late January 1907 provoked a local furore when they attempted to put on plays which the local people, and particularly supporters of the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin, felt were derogatory of the Irish Nation. See Ibid., p. 250-251.

86. P. Pearse (editorial) in An Claidheamh Soluis, 9 February 1907.