[In the following essay, McDiarmid argues that three early controversies—the censorship of Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, the American response to Synge's Playboy, and the debate over whether to produce Shaw's play, O'Flaherty VC—helped the Abbey define itself artistically and strategically as a national theater.]

The history of the early Abbey Theatre offers a good means of understanding the way controversies, like theatre itself, transform the belligerent into the ludic. Three successive controversies in particular constitute a little sequence of causes and effects: the controversy over Bernard Shaw's play The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, which was banned in England for blasphemy and obscenity but which was performed in Ireland in 1909; the controversy over the Philadelphia performance of John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in January 1912; and the 1915 debate over whether Shaw's O'Flaherty VC should be produced at the Abbey. Controversies, as these examples show, are not a means of resolution but rather a sign of its absence, functioning as a conduit of strong feeling.

Controversies create a field for disputation where almost anything is allowable, and almost any word or action can be read in the context of public antagonisms. A tactical genius like Lady Gregory could stake out a position with whatever materials came her way—a cup of tea, for instance, or a potato. On 20 August 1909, Lady Gregory was meeting at the Viceregal Lodge with the viceroy of Ireland, Lord Aberdeen, and he was pressuring her, in his polite, dithering way, to withdraw Blanco Posnet from production by the Abbey. He happened to offer Lady Gregory (and Yeats) some tea: she felt, she wrote, “a consuming desire for that tea after the dust of the railway journey all across Ireland,” but she didn't accept it. Making note of what occurred during the meeting, Lady Gregory refers to “the kindly offers of a cup of tea,” the “consuming desire” for it, and then “our heroic refusal, lest its acceptance should in any way, even if it did not weaken our resolve, compromise our principles” (Gregory 93). Of sacrifices made in the name of Irish cultural autonomy, this one may not rank very high, but Lady Gregory was conscious of the meaning she would be able to give it. Four years later, the heroic refusal would be recorded in her book Our Irish Theatre. The point of the sacrifice was to publicize it.

The potato was originally someone else's gesture. It was thrown at the Abbey actress Eithne Magee as she played the part of Pegeen Mike in Playboy in New York on 27 November 1911. According to newspaper accounts of the evening, Lady Gregory gave interviews backstage “drinking tea and holding in one hand the potato that had struck Miss McGee” [sic] (“Riot” 2). Lady Gregory held the potato not because she wanted to throw it at someone else but because she wanted to transform the angry gesture into a playful pose. It was always her way, as a controversialist, to underreact, to remain calm and amused, and to make her antagonists seem like hysterical fools. Holding the potato, like refusing to drink tea, was a piece of improvisation that signaled both superiority and invulnerability. Lady Gregory had control of the potato, and she also had self-control—she did not throw it at anyone. Throwing vegetables or eggs is, of course, a traditional gesture of repudiation and insult, but it doesn't happen every day. The license of controversy is one of the unwritten rules of the genre.

Although neither drinking the tea nor holding the potato was hostile, both gestures were agonistic, part of a larger and complex system of antagonisms. The term “system” suggests the way in which any of a number of gestures or moves—a letter to the editor, a flung potato, a hiss, a riot, a satirical poem—can all be related to one another. Controversies come in groups, and it is also useful to think of “systems” of controversies, especially when they are related historically. Abbey controversies form such a system. The argument I want to make requires you to shift your focus a bit. Instead of seeing the plays in the foreground, the controversies in the background—instead of seeing the plays as primary and the controversies as secondary—you need to see them all in the same plane, all as equally important; you need to see the plays and the controversies both as forms of expressive behavior, both as forms of theatre. Controversies, like plays, require scripting, casting, directing, and timing; they also require imagination in their planning and daring in their execution. They require publicity, advertisement, and a genius for visibility. And so if you can shift your perspective and see the controversies not as an afterthought or as secondary but rather as equal in significance and in theatricality to the plays, then you can understand my argument—that the controversies constitute a tradition themselves, that they have a history, and that they refer back to other controversies more than they refer to the plays. The modern Irish controversy is a genre with its own traditions and customs and allusions. To say that controversies form a genre, or type, of expression, and that as a sequence they form traditions, implies that controversies are intertextual: they refer to one another, they copy forms and styles and modes of expression. By that I mean something as simple as throwing vegetables to express disapproval or heckling or coughing excessively so that the actors can't be heard. All of these are actions copied from previous controversies, a theatrics of protest handed down because controversies are modeled on, and are the model for, other controversies.

The Blanco Posnet controversy (1909) marks the convergence of two traditions of controversy: Irish and English. The English tradition involved the continuing debate about stage censorship, a long-running controversy that became more important in the late nineteenth century.¹ The relevant law, dating from 1737, required submission of plays to the Lord Chamberlain (an officer of the Royal Household) two weeks before the first performance. The Lord Chamberlain had the power to deny licenses without giving any reason and to issue fines if he was not obeyed. The plays were actually read by a man called “the examiner of plays”; in 1909, this was one George Alexander Redford. Shaw was involved in debates, symposia, and letter-writing campaigns about censorship throughout his career; he was an interested observer in 1892, when the House of Commons Select Committee on Theatres and Places of Entertainment held hearings but did not ultimately recommend any changes in the law relating to theatrical censorship. And in 1894 Mrs. Warren's Profession, Shaw's serious and provocative play about a prostitute, was denied a license. So when, in the spring of 1909, the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays/Censorship was announced, Shaw wrote two plays as a challenge. In other words, the debate about censorship itself inspired these plays. One of those, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, Shaw pointedly titled “a sermon in crude melodrama” (Shaw 169). Blanco Posnet is an American morality play, set in the Wild West, about a horse thief who gives his stolen horse to the mother of a dying child. The child dies anyway, and that death causes Blanco, the horse thief, to undergo a religious conversion. A benign and charitable sheriff presides over the whole scene, and the play ends when the entire community happily adjourns to the local saloon.

Why would anyone want to censor such sentimentality? The play was a tease, taunting the censor with high-minded banality and a very few naughty passages. Here, for example, is the passage in which the “bad” brother Blanco tells his “good” brother, Elder Daniels, what it feels like to be “shewn up” by God:

BLANCO:
… He hasnt finished with you yet. He always has a trick up His sleeve—
ELDER Daniels:
Oh, is that the way to speak of the ruler of universe—the great and almighty God?
BLANCO:
He's a sly one. He's a mean one. He lies low for you. He plays cat and mouse with you. He lets you run loose until you think youre shut of Him; and then, when you least expect it, He's got you.
ELDER Daniels:
Speak more respectful Blanco—more reverent.

(Shaw 254)

Shaw essentially put pointers into the text to draw the examiner's attention to the blasphemy. In case the examiner was too dense to notice it, Shaw has Elder Daniels say, “Speak more respectful …” The other passage that was intended to awaken the attentions of the examiner occurs when Blanco says of the local whore, “I accuse the fair Euphemia of immoral relations with every man in this town …” (263). By contemporary standards, this “obscenity” is not even noticeable, and even by 1909 standards, it was pretty mild, but the point was to include a few, just a few, offensive phrases necessary to provoke the examiner, in a story that is otherwise pious and nonsubversive. In other words, the whole play was driven by the idea of controversy, by 170 years of debate about censorship. The play was duly denied its license, as Shaw had hoped, while it was already in rehearsal in May 1909.²

But there was a funny loophole in that 1737 law: the examiner's writ did not run in Ireland. So Ireland, as Shaw had long anticipated, might offer a site from which to defy the Lord Chamberlain. There, Blanco Posnet would find its place in a sequence of Abbey controversies. From the first play produced by the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, Yeats's Countess Cathleen, through Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), and especially his The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Abbey plays had tended to irritate certain types of people, especially strong nationalists, because of their seemingly cavalier attitude toward female virtue, toward Irish masculinity, and toward Catholicism.³ In 1909, the Playboy riots were relatively recent and the Abbey was still suffering from the accusation that the play had insulted Irish country people of both genders.

So when in June 1909 Shaw offered the Abbey directors Blanco Posnet for performance in Dublin, they grabbed it at once because it was a great opportunity. An Irish performance of the play would be perfect all-around, contributing to the two separate controversy traditions: Shaw could defy the English censor by having the play produced, and the Abbey could advertise itself to the world as defying the authority of English law and thereby win back its nationalist supporters. The construction of the Blanco Posnet controversy as an answer to the Playboy controversy is emphasized in Lady Gregory's book, Our Irish Theatre, because chapter 4 is entitled “The Fight over ‘The Playboy’” and chapter 6 is entitled “The Fight with the Castle.”

The ‘mentality’ of the controversy, as Lady Gregory designed it, was very much like that of her plays The Rising of the Moon and Gaol Gate. The whole event was given the coloration of mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalism—militant, populist, unambiguous. When the play was in rehearsal in early August, Lady Gregory wrote to Shaw, “One of the Belfast papers in its notice that Blanco was to be performed put as a heading ‘Probably interference of the Lord Lieutenant’ but that is too good to be true—we could raise a great cry of injustice to an ill treated son of Erin if this were done” (Laurence and Grene 12-13). And Shaw wrote back, catching her tone, “If the Lord Lieutenant would only forbid an Irish play, without reading it, … at the command of an official of the King's household in London, then the green flag would indeed wave over Abbey St” (Laurence and Grene 18-19). Gregory constructed the event by recasting a type of Young-Ireland discourse with a touch of Fenian intensity: “great cry of injustice to an ill treated son of Erin” is a deliberately theatrical use of patriotic rhetoric, as is Shaw's talk about the green flag waving over Abbey Street. They are talking in quotation marks, as Lady Gregory was when she wrote of her “heroic refusal” of the viceroy's tea. Later in the controversy, Shaw wrote Lady Gregory: “If we can only fix the suppression of the play on the King, then ‘if the colour we must wear be England's cruel red,’ we perish gloriously” (Laurence and Grene 36). In short, even in private correspondence, Shaw and Lady Gregory used a discourse designed to associate their opposition to Dublin Castle with popular nationalism. In her letters to Shaw and in her visits to Dublin Castle—in all these private occasions—Lady Gregory spoke as if she were the leader of a popular uprising and as if every word were being broadcast to her followers. Of course, every word was published in her accounts of the event, so all the private visits were on the record—her record.

It is important to realize that no one knew whether or not the viceroy had the power to suppress a play in Ireland based on the objection of the Lord Chamberlain in England. The viceroy didn't know himself.⁴ The final clause of the Abbey Theatre's patent vested power in him to declare that patent null and void, but the patent would have to be violated in performance before a play could be stopped. In fact, the Abbey's existence was at risk in this episode, because Aberdeen might have found that the patent was violated. This is classic controversy territory: the problem arises in an area that hasn't been legislated, an interstitial area that no one has ever thought about.

The Castle tried to negotiate with the Abbey and avoid a showdown: they didn't want to find out how little power they had. In Lady Gregory's meetings with the undersecretary, Sir James Dougherty, and with Lord Aberdeen, the viceroy (Lord Leftenant), on 12, 13, 14, and 20 August 1909, Lady Gregory used the Young Ireland discourse again in a sardonic manner, as if to remind the Castle authorities that in threatening the Abbey Theatre they were playing the role of nasty colonial rulers. The first visit came after the Castle got in touch with the Abbey solicitors, and the others followed thereafter. (Yeats, as the other Abbey director, was with Lady Gregory on several, but not all, of these visits. In her journal, most of the good lines that Lady Gregory quotes are her own.) Gregory's rhetoric constructed the Castle's position as well as the Abbey's. Her very first words to the undersecretary in her very first visit are notable. He said, “Well.” And she said, “Are you going to cut off our heads?” Although her metaphor appears to grant political superiority to the Castle, it is clear from her flippant tone that she thinks this use of power silly. In fact, Sir James's response was a rebuke: “This is a very serious business” (Laurence and Grene 15). At the end of her fourth meeting with Sir James, Lady Gregory flaunted a misquotation from Parnell: “who shall set bounds to the march of a Nation?” (Laurence and Grene 34).

This rebellious tone surprised the gentlemen in the Castle, because it wasn't what they were expecting from Lady Gregory. Lacking any vision of how to reconstruct the controversy or how to get rid of it, they fell back on manners and what they hoped would be common class assumptions. Holding up the newspaper with the announcements of Blanco Posnet, Sir James said in bewilderment, “You defy us, you advertise it under our very nose, at the time everyone is making a fight with the Censor,” and then later, “Oh, Lady Gregory, appeal to your own common sense.” While Lady Gregory, ever mindful of public relations, was positioning herself to “raise a great cry of injustice” and make a “heroic sacrifice,” Lord Aberdeen was trying to find common ground and show how close, in fact, their positions really were. He said to her, “You must not think I am a sour faced Puritan. I am very interested in the drama. In fact at Oxford it was often said that that would be my line. My Grandfather also, though considered so strict, went so far as to take part in plays under a pseudonym. So you see I have a great deal of sympathy with you” (Laurence and Grene 32). Lord Aberdeen implied that it was only a bureaucratic accident that obliged him to prevent the performance of Blanco Posnet, “because of the courtesies of officials toward one another; and I as the King's representative cannot go against the King” (Laurence and Grene 33). Sir James also tried to show his sympathy by distancing himself from the examiner of plays. Lady Gregory cited one of Redford's sillier objections to Blanco Posnet and said to Sir James, “How can we think much of the opinion of a man like that?”, and Sir James replied, “I believe he was a Bank Manager” (17). All these sophisticated titled people, who loved theatre, enjoyed Shaw, and were not themselves bothered by fake blasphemy and obscenity, were held in thrall by George Alexander Redford (the censor), who, like the good bureaucrat he was, blue-pencilled the offensive passages in the play. It was really he who made possible the redemption of the Abbey's nationalist reputation.

Of course, the whole point of producing the play was to be threatened in public: that was why Lady Gregory had written to Shaw that viceregal interference would be “too good to be true.” Throughout the negotiations, the viceroy had been unable to explain which clause in the Abbey patent was being violated: the patent required the plays to be Irish, and he made the case that a play written by a Londoner about an American horse thief wasn't Irish. He argued that the blasphemous and obscene language might instigate a riot, which was forbidden by the patent. He kept trying to find a reason. Finally, after all the conversations, which led nowhere, the Castle issued a press release that was published in the evening papers. It said that “His Excellency … has arrived at the conclusion that in its original form the play is not in accordance with the conditions and restrictions contained in the Patent as granted by the Crown”; the statement also mentioned “the serious consequences which the production of the play … might entail” (Laurence and Grene 40-41). This vaguely worded threat was a threat nevertheless, and it gave the Abbey directors just what they wanted, an opportunity to issue a defiant press release in response. Here is what the Abbey directors claimed in their press release:

If our Patent is in danger it is because the English censorship is being extended to Ireland, or because the Lord Leftenant is about to revive a right not exercised for 150 years, to forbid at his pleasure any play produced in any Dublin theatre, all these theatres holding their Patent from him. We are not concerned with the question of English censorship, but we are very certain that the conditions of the two countries are different, and that we must not by accepting the English censor's ruling, give away anything of the liberty of the Irish theatre of the future.

(Gregory 218)

The nature of the play itself was so clearly a secondary issue to everyone that the Abbey waited until the next day's papers to defend it as “a high and weighty argument upon the working of the Spirit of God in man's heart” (Laurence and Grene 43). But everyone knew that the play was not blasphemous or obscene; Irish cultural autonomy was the issue, not theology or morality.

The art of this controversy, the deliberate construction of the controversy to resemble an act of nineteenth-century nationalist resistance, is clear when you look at some of the ‘unrebellious’ facts that made the ‘resistance’ successful. The opening-night audience was a very stylish crowd. The first performance (25 August) took place in the middle of Horse Show week, and all the commotion about the play made it the ‘place to be’ on opening night. In fact, Lady Lyttelton, the wife of the commander-in-chief of British forces in Ireland, was there with a large party⁵ (Two days later the Lytteltons gave a dance attended by Lord and Lady Aberdeen, so no important friendships were ruined [“Vice-regal Court”].) Dublin's richest unionist, Lord Iveagh, was at opening night with a party of six. In his diary, Joseph Holloway observed the presence of “all artistic, literary and social Dublin”: John McCormack, George Russell, William Orpen, Frank Sheehy Skeffington, Mrs. Shaw, Robert Gregory (Laurence and Grene 48). James Joyce was also there, reviewing the play for a Trieste newspaper. Lily Yeats, who attended both the dress rehearsal and the opening performance with her brother Jack and his wife Cottie, noted the presence of Lord Dunsany (Lily Yeats).

These, then, were the people, titled folk and the artistic elite, who made the green flag wave over Abbey Street, who took part in the “march of a Nation,” who helped Lady Gregory make her stand against the viceroy. Her nationalist construction of the event continued backstage, where she taught the actresses the ballad “The Lower Castle Yard,” a song about a radical nationalist of the 1850s whose political poems get him in trouble with Dublin Castle. And in Lady Gregory's account in Our Irish Theatre, the audience's applause is interpreted as a gesture in the controversy:

The play began, and till near the end it was received in perfect silence. Perhaps the audience were waiting for the wicked bits to begin. Then, at the end, there was a tremendous burst of cheering, and we knew we had won. Some stranger outside asked, what was going on in the Theatre. “They are defying the Lord Lieutenant” was the answer; and when the crowd heard the cheering, they took it up and it went far out through the streets.

(Gregory 96)

Lily Yeats also describes “a big buzzing crowd of onlookers” and then says the play “went with great go all through & got a great reception—the English Press men made a bolt for the door where the post-office had messengers waiting to take the telegrams” (Yeats). The passage from Lady Gregory presents the controversy itself as theatre and indicates how the crowd in the streets, those people who hadn't even seen the play, participated vicariously in defying the Lord Lieutenant. When they start cheering, the defiance shifted from the stage to the streets. The applause of the stylish audience was transformed into the seditious cheers of the crowd outside, and it was not the end of the play but rather the Abbey's triumph in the controversy that was being cheered.

The controversy around Blanco Posnet, then, became part of the lengthening sequence of Abbey controversies and contributed to the style, atmosphere, and assumptions of later controversies. The American tour of the Abbey (1911-1912) was dominated by the history of Abbey controversies. The Abbey brought Blanco Posnet, as well as Playboy, to America as well, but the excitement was all generated by Playboy.⁶ The local protests that greeted performances of Playboy and a few of the other plays were less responses to the plays themselves than to Dublin protests and protests in other American cities: Boston responded to Dublin, Providence responded to Boston, New York responded to all the previous cities, and Philadelphia to Dublin, New York, etc.. Each separate controversy was inspired not by what was happening on the stage but by the dynamics of the whole sequence. Actually, by this time, Dublin audiences were not interrupting productions of Playboy: it could be acted there without incident. However, The Gaelic American, the newspaper run by the New York Fenian John Devoy, kept up a barrage of angry, sarcastic attacks on the Abbey players in news items, features, and editorials throughout the six months of their American tour. More space was devoted to Playboy, Yeats, Lady Gregory and company than to John Redmond and the third Home Rule Bill. “A Great Work of Dirty Art,” The Gaelic American proclaimed on its front page (“Paints the Playboy in Glowing Colors”). The week before, The Gaelic American's editorial had noted of Playboy that “The whole setting is barbarous, bizarre, and untrue to life, and so grossly libellous that if the writer was sane he must have been a malignant creature” (“Stamp Out the Atrocious Libel”). As the players moved from city to city, Irish-American societies had time to plan their protests: Philadelphia would have felt shamed if the Abbey players had been able to perform there uninterrupted. An Irish-American in Pittsburgh wrote to a friend in Philadelphia after the protest there, “Tell them the boys here are all proud of them” (O'Loughlin).

Not all Irish-Americans were throwing potatoes at the actors: then, as now, Irish-America was not a monolithic social group but rather a cluster of subcultures—the AOH, the Gaelic League, urbane political figures—whose members did not necessarily think alike. In fact, members of the Boston Gaelic League visited Lady Gregory to tell her that they supported the Abbey players (Gregory 100). William Leahy, the representative of the mayor of Boston, enjoyed all the plays and said “They are most artistic, wonderfully acted, and to my mind absolutely inoffensive to the patriotic Irishman” (Gregory 102). In New York, Chief Magistrate McAdoo, who attended a performance of Playboy on behalf of the mayor, said he had seen many more objectionable plays in New York and that he didn't think the theatre's license should be suspended (Gregory 114).

The Irish-Americans who protested against Playboy and a few of the other plays that the Abbey brought to America did not necessarily aspire to assimilation with Anglo-Saxon Protestant American social customs but rather to the control of culture exercised by that dominant class. Thus, they played, in this controversy, the rebel role that Lady Gregory and Shaw had played in 1909, when the Abbey had welcomed the opportunity to assert its independence from the cultural authority of a decrepit and silly royal bureaucracy. In America, the Abbey directors were identified as Irish landlords: as The Gaelic American said of Lady Gregory and Playboy, “a woman with a foreign title was patroness of the vile thing” (“Philadelphia Spanks ‘The Playboy’”). As Lady Gregory traveled with the players from city to city, she was welcomed and entertained by, and generally identified with, the American upper-class Protestant establishment. These were the people who controlled culture in America in 1912: people like Isabella Stewart Gardiner of Boston, famous now for the museum that used to be her house; the people who sent their children to Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and the University of Pennsylvania, where Lady Gregory lectured; and the lawyer Henry LaBarre Jayne and his wife, with whom Gregory stayed in Philadelphia. Through the Jaynes, Lady Gregory met the members of the elite American Philosophical Society, and then they all went off to “a ball at the Assembly rooms” (Gregory 118).

High culture, linked with high society, was in the control of wealthy Protestants, and from the point of view of the Irish-American Joseph McGarrity, the Jaynes, Wisters, Rodmans, Biddles, Warburtons, and other members of Philadelphia “society” played the role that Dublin Castle had played in 1909—as agents of a moribund institution exercising its powers to determine what was allowed on the stage. McGarrity, a businessman born in County Tyrone in 1874, was the genius behind the Philadelphia controversy. Because in 1912 he was selling liquor, Lady Gregory refers to him as a “publican,” but he also edited a newspaper and conducted many business ventures (Laurence and Grene 71). He later became wealthy and left his enormous collection of Irish books and manuscripts to Villanova University. It was his cultural aspirations that (I believe) gave energy to his involvement in this protest: this is the most Philistine moment in the life of a great bibliophile.

Lady Gregory and her allies had created the expressive field that was the Blanco Posnet controversy through public relations strategies: through press releases, behind-the-scenes politicking, and published accounts of their victory. What McGarrity and his lads did was different: they had to expand the field in which the Abbey's plays existed so that it included themselves. They created an alternative theatre, distracting the audience drawn by the original play using their own performance. As is clear from the notes of the Irish-American Club in Philadelphia (for 14 January 1912), the Philadelphia Irish first expanded the field in which Playboy existed by writing their own script. The minute book records the debate about what precisely these men (only men were involved) should do. The question was one of stagecraft and strategy.

Brother McGinn gave it as his opinion that the wisest course would be to place the men in sections all over the house, and keep up a disturbance through the Acts to the end. Brother Crossin dissented from Course stating that he believed in union and that the opposition when made should come unanimously from all parts of the house. […] Brother Harry Carney was for an entire program of “passive resistance” by which he meant hissing and other signs of disapproval at all objectionable parts … Brother H. Carney stated that it was advisable that twenty men witness the Play on Monday evening. Brother McLaughlin agreed with Brother Carney's report and the recommendations contained therein “viz” to protest vigorously by hissing at all objectionable items. The recommendations of the Committee were unanimously adopted.

(Minute Book of the Irish American Club, Philadelphia)

By speaking during the play, they would challenge the authority of the producers and attract the notice of the audience. By offering a counter-play, they would draw attention to the issue of who controls culture—by controlling it, however briefly and intermittently, themselves.

Performances of Playboy were disrupted on two nights, 15 and 16 January. Here is an account of the first night from the Philadelphia Ledger:

The presentation of J. M. Synge's comedy Playboy of the Western World caused an immense disturbance last night at the Adelphi theatre. […] The play had proceeded only about 10 minutes when a man, said to be Joseph McLaughlin, national vice-president of the AOH, rose from his place in the centre of the house and called out, “I protest against this play. It is a shame. Why don't you present Irish character as it really is?” The audience, which was one of the most fashionable which has assembled this season, had been rather expecting, not to say hoping, that something of the sort would occur. Everyone turned round and those in the balcony and gallery rushed forward to see as much as they could of what was taking place. […] Meantime, the man who had started the trouble was approached hastily by several policemen […] they at first merely tried to quiet the disturbers—there was quite a group of them by this time—but, failing in this, the trouble makers were promptly ejected from the playhouse. The fashionable audience applauded loudly, and many a sedate personage could be heard calling, “Put them all out! Let the play go on! This is an outrage!” […] The noise had become so great in all parts of the house by this time that the actors had to give up in despair, and, although the curtain was not lowered, they stood about the stage in rather bored attitudes. […] During the first series of disturbances 30 persons were put out and two men were taken to City Hall under arrest, charged with assault and battery and inciting to riot. […] This first outbreak was immensely exciting, but members of the fashionable set who were present […] were rather amused at it all. […] Indeed, it developed that one wellknown matron had laid a wager with her husband that there would be trouble, he declaring that such a thing could not occur in Philadelphia. […] When seeming quiet had been restored, there was yet another outburst, this time started by a man in the first row of the balcony, who said, “As one born and bred in Ireland, I protest.” Realizing his possible fate, he was content with this and stalked out. It was evident, however, that a sort of cabal existed for the interruption of the play. […] Another man downstairs who had presumably arranged his protest in the oratorical measures of a Patrick Henry cried out, “From time immemoriam” [sic]. That was all he could say, for a big policeman promptly took him in hand. […] Those who went ostensibly to show their disapproval did not by any means wait for those passages in the play which in other cities have been the occasion of difficulties. The beginning of troublous times came much sooner here, and many of the subsequent lines, to which objection has been taken, were left unchallenged. […]

(Abbey Company United States Tour, 1911-1912)

The reporter makes it clear that this controversy was caused by a previous controversy, not by any of the offensive lines in the play: they don't even wait for the “bad” parts. Actors and audience have changed places, because the “bored” actors on stage give up and watch the drama taking place on the other side. In addition, an Irish-American controversy has replaced an Irish one, because the warring parties are the “fashionable” set and the members of the Irish-American club, with McGarrity and McLaughlin determined to confront the consumers of this anti-Irish high culture—the Wisters, Rodmans, Biddles, and so forth. You can see the license of controversy in action here: the society types are yelling back at the Irish-Americans, but then, as the reporter says, they were hoping for some excitement anyway. The ludic and the antagonistic are mixed, and the reporter clearly enjoyed the greatly expanded expressive field.

The Gaelic American actually made a similar point when its reporter wrote of the two nights of protest, “If there was a genuine dramatist among the Abbey Theatre crowd, he would find in these scenes and incidents better material for a good play than he could discover … in the shebeen houses and the dunghills […]” (“Real Comedy Off the Stage” 4). By the end of that week, the expressive field of the controversy had been expanded even more: it now included the Magistrate's Court and the Court of Quarter Sessions in Philadelphia and an extended cast of lawyers and judges. Joseph McGarrity earned the accolades of The Gaelic American for getting the Abbey players arrested, something that happened in no other American city. Only the year before, in preparation for a visit by Sarah Bernhardt in La Samaritaine, the Pennsylvania State Legislature had passed a bill forbidding “any dramatic, theatrical, operatic, or vaudeville exhibition … or moving pictures, of a lascivious, sacrilegious, obscene, indecent or immoral nature or character”; violation was punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both (“Pennsylvania Air Bad for Playboy”). The night of 17 January, the players were “technically arrested” in the theatre (they were never actually locked behind bars), and the morning of 19 January, witnesses about the moral character of the play were examined before a magistrate and then before Judge Carr. The courtroom testimony, like the protest, made excellent “alternative theatre.” So Lady Gregory seemed to think as she wrote to her son Robert:

At three o'clock we went to the court, a large one this time, and the Judge had a nice face. He had been to my lecture here the first time I came and is a friend of the Jaynes. He didn't know anything of the play, and had to be told the whole story as it went on, just like old Wall [the magistrate who tried the Playboy rioters] in Dublin at our first riot, so before the case was over audience and officials were in a broad grin. Mr. McGarrity the liquor dealer got a different hearing this time, was asked some pertinent questions instead of being simply encouraged, as by Magistrate Carey. […] The dramatic event was the arrival of [John] Quinn while a priest [Father P. J. McGarrity, John McGarrity's brother] was being examined. We had got leave from the Judge for him to cross-examine, and the priest had to confess that the people of Ireland do use the name of God at other times than in blessing or thanking those who have been kind to them […] as he had at first asserted upon oath. Also when he based his attack on indecency on the “poacher's love” spoken of by Christie he was made to admit that a few sentences earlier marriage had been spoken of “in a fortnight's time when the banns will be called.” Whether this made it more or less moral he was not asked to say. He called the play libidinous. The players beamed and the audience enjoyed themselves, and then when the Director of Public Safety was called and said he and his wife had enjoyed the play very much and seen nothing to shock anybody, the enemy had received as Quinn said “a body blow. …” It was a little disappointment that the Judge did not give his verdict there and then, that we might have cabled home.

(Laurence and Grene 73)

The Blanco Posnet controversy was a famous victory for the Abbey, but the Philadelphia Playboy episode was claimed as a victory by both sides. Judge Carr (on 23 January) simply discharged the players and made no comment whatsoever about the case. Lady Gregory was by then in Pittsburgh with the company, and she “made a little speech” from the stage of Carnegie Hall there (Gregory 128). The Gaelic American's boldface headlines read, “PENNSYLVANIA AIR BAD FOR PLAYBOY” and then “McGarrity to Carry Case to Superior Court.” Lady Gregory could claim that the Abbey had won: those arrested were never found guilty, and the Playboy was performed without interruption in Indianapolis and Chicago during the following week. McGarrity, however, had created a serious obstacle for the Abbey and had caused Lady Gregory some anxious moments.

In the debate over the proposed Abbey production of Shaw's O'Flaherty V. C., the controversy was suppressed as well as the play itself. I suggested at the beginning that instead of seeing the plays as primary and the controversies as secondary, you need to see them all in the same plane, all as equally important, all as forms of expressive behavior. In this case, as in the case of Blanco Posnet, the composition of the play was controversy-driven. The inspiration for O'Flaherty V. C. was actually the tradition of Abbey controversies. Writing a deliberately provocative play, Shaw wrote competitively against Synge, hoping for riots in the theatre. The play's subject is an Irishman home on leave from the Great War, and Shaw wrote to Lady Gregory, “The picture of the Irish character will make the Playboy seem a patriotic rhapsody by comparison.” Expecting the actor Arthur Sinclair to play the lead, Shaw wrote, “Sinclair must be prepared for brickbats” (Laurence and Grene 95). The play was set at Coole, and Shaw wrote Lady Gregory, “The scene is quite simply before the porch of your house” (Laurence and Grene 94). Following is Shaw's summary of the plot: “The idea is that O'Flaherty's experience in the trenches has induced in him a terrible realism and an unbearable candor. He sees Ireland as it is, his mother as she is, his sweetheart as she is; and he goes back to the dreaded trenches joyfully for the sake of peace and quietness” (Laurence and Grene 95). No doubt to ensure a good healthy riot, the script included insults aimed at many categories of people: landlords, women, Irish nationalists, and English patriots.

Shaw also anticipated a replay of the Blanco Posnet controversy: in the same letter he said of the play, “At worst, it will be a barricade for the theatre to die gloriously on” (Collected Letters 95). In a letter to Yeats, Shaw wrote, “It is by no means sure that it will be licensed in England; and a few preliminary trials in Dublin might do no harm” (Collected Letters 104). Shaw's happy vision was of the completely offensive play, offensive to audiences and to civil and military authorities, and he envisioned commotion everywhere: audiences rioting, Dublin Castle issuing threats, and Lady Gregory calm, smiling, and defiant throughout it all. Purporting nonetheless to believe that his play might be construed as part of the war effort—a patriotic gesture—Shaw subtitled it “A Recruiting Pamphlet” and wrote Yeats: “It is written so as to appeal very strongly to that love of adventure and desire to see the wider world and escape from the cramping parochialism of Irish life which is more helpful to recruiting than all the silly placards about Belgium and the like …” (Collected Letters 110). After the first performance was announced, however, in November 1915, Dublin Castle intervened in the person of undersecretary Sir Matthew Nathan, suggesting that the play be postponed. While all this was transpiring, Lady Gregory was in America again with the Abbey players, and Yeats wrote her that when he told Shaw they wouldn't fight the issue, “Shaw, I thought, was disappointed. He said, if Lady Gregory was in London, she would fight it, but added afterwards, that he didn't really want us to but thought you would do it out of love of mischief. I told him that was a misunderstanding of your character …” (Collected Letters 106).

Sir Matthew Nathan's letters make clear that it was precisely the license of controversy that Dublin Castle didn't want. In 1915 recruitment in Ireland was not doing very well, and the last thing the civil and military authorities wanted was a riot in a theatre about that cause. Politely Nathan suggested that it would be better for all parties involved if the play were withdrawn: “… the representation of this play at the present moment would result in demonstrations which could do no good either to the Abbey Theatre or to the cause that at any rate a large section of Irishmen have made their own.” Outside of Dublin rumors that the play had been suppressed under the Defence of the Realm Act and a few newspaper interviews with Shaw, there was no public controversy. The first performance of the play actually took place at the Western Front in 1917, with Robert Loraine (Robert Gregory's commanding officer) in the title role; Robert Gregory played O'Flaherty's mother. On the actual field of battle, it was beyond controversy.

Because it is the custom to consider controversies of limited importance, most people would consider all these things quite petty—all this ‘fuss and bother’ about not drinking tea, throwing potatoes, issuing press releases, and winning little victories that are soon forgotten by everyone (until they are rediscovered by scholars). I could come up with a whole series of dismissive phrases—tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing, blowing off steam—that assume the insignificance of most controversies. But as the dismissive metaphors themselves imply, controversies are large forces in a small site. The great drama of social revolution that historians see in wars, or political demonstrations, or in voting patterns, in the Magna Carta or Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka—that drama I see in controversies, which are micro-units of social change. They show as if in miniature, in polite visits to an imperial official or rude shouts in a Philadelphia theatre, the gradual shifts of power which gather force for decades before historians accept their reality. Although controversies don't generally cause change, they make it visible, in the theatre, on the other side of the stage.⁷

Notes

1. For an account of English stage censorship by one of the last English censors, see Johnston's The Lord Chamberlain's Blue Pencil.

2. For more commentary and analysis on this and other aspects of the Blanco Posnet controversy, see McDiarmid's “Augusta Gregory, Bernard Shaw, and the Shewing-Up of Dublin Castle.”

3. See Frazier's Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre for an analysis of these and other early Abbey controversies.

4. See McDiarmid, note 15, 41-42.

5. So Shaw wrote Gilbert Murray after the opening performance: Lady Lyttelton “brought her whole flock to the play with military honors” (Shaw, Collected Letters 865).

6. See John Harrington's The Irish Play on the New York Stage for a detailed commentary on the Abbey's November 1911 production of Playboy in New York.

7. I would like to thank my hosts on the occasions when this paper was read: Sheila O'Donnellan of the Lady Gregory Autumn Gathering (Gort, County Galway); Christina Hunt Mahony of the Irish Studies Center (Catholic University of America); and Stephen Watt, Indiana University. I am grateful to Mary Helen Thuente for presenting this paper for me at the symposium entitled “Nationalism and a National Theatre: One Hundred Years of Irish Drama,” Indiana University, May 1999. The National Library of Ireland has generously granted permission to quote from unpublished work in the Manuscript Collection; and PMLA has given permission to use parts of an earlier version of this essay. Permission to quote from unpublished letters by Lily Yeats has been given by A. P. Watt on behalf of Anne Yeats and Michael B. Yeats.