|
From British Drama 1890-1950: A Critical History by
R. F. Dietrich |
Link to Title Page
& Table of Contents
IRISH DRAMA:
SOUL MUSIC FROM JOHN BULL’S OTHER
In the drama as in most else,
The precipitating factor in the arrival of
a native drama in Ireland, according to William Butler Yeats, was the death of
Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, after
he was hounded out of office by an extramarital scandal. Parnell had led the
Irish parliamentary drive to gain independence from England, and with his
death, so died the hopes for political independence. The resultant loss of
interest in politics in general led some of the young of
A leader in the general Irish Renaissance,
Yeats in particular was instrumental in the development of a national theater.
Publishing his first play, The
Countess Cathleen, in 1892, and experiencing a London production of The Land of Hearts’ Desire in
1894, Yeats had for many years
been talking up the need for an Irish theater when, after a few meetings with
the widowed Lady Gregory, beginning in 1896, the two began serious planning. In 1899 they joined with Edward Martyn, her piously Catholic neighbor, and the
anti-Catholic novelist George Moore, a produced playwright connected with J. T.
Grein’s Independent Theatre in
Along with Martyn’s
uncontroversial Heather Field,
the Irish Literary Theatre began in 1899 with a production of The
Countess Cathleen, the stormy reaction to which was to set
the tone for the later Abbey Theatre, periodically afflicted by rioting. In
this case some “patriot” wrote a pamphlet that attacked The Countess Cathleen for being
heretical and blasphemous, and Yeats found himself on the stage trying to howl
down a mob and finally having to call out the police. Later Abbey
productions—of Synge’s The Playboy
of the Western World, Shaw’s The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet,
and O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars—landed Yeats and Lady Gregory in political
hot water, either with Irish super-patriots who thought no Irishman should ever
be satirized or with English-aligned colonial authorities who smelled sedition.
On the occasion of The Plough and
the Stars, Yeats scolded an unruly audience: “You have
disgraced yourselves again. Is this to be an ever recurring celebration of the
arrival of Irish genius?”2
In the initial phase, the pioneers had no
sense of permanency, moving like gypsies from one public hall to another. And
the actors had to be imported from
The effort to continue took a positive turn
when in 1902 the actor brothers William and Frank Fay, believing that the
dramatic movement needed to pass from its literary phase to a phase of building
a native Irish company with thorough training in the arts of the theater,
joined with some of Maud Gonne’s “Daughters of Ireland” to form the Irish
National Dramatic Company, producing, among other plays, Yeats’s
Cathleen ni
Houlihan (with Maud Gonne in the lead).
This led in 1903 to the
formation of the Irish National Theatre Society, with Yeats as figurehead
president, and Maud Gonne, A.E. (George Russell), and Hyde as vice presidents.
Under the practical managership of the Fays, such
Irish actors as Dudley Digges, Marie nic Shiubhlaigh, Marie Quinn, and
Sara Allgood provided the foundation for what would
soon become one of the finest acting companies in the world, achieving
international fame with tours to England (beginning in 1903) and to America (beginning in 1911).
In six different series of productions in 1902-1903, the plays of five now-forgotten playwrights, along with the
first plays of Lady Gregory and Synge, were performed in repertory with the
plays of Yeats, A.E., and Padraic Colum.
In 1904, Yeats, gaining power from being the publicist, theorist,
tactician, and controversialist of the group, persuaded a philanthropic
Englishwoman named Annie Horniman, a former colleague
of his in a Rosicrucian society and the woman who had backed The Land of Hearts’ Desire in
London in 1894, to put up most
of the money for converting the abandoned concert hall of the Mechanics’
Institute on Abbey Street and part of the old Dublin Morgue next door into the
Abbey Theatre. She also provided an annual subsidy until 1910, when she transferred her interest to
establishing a theater in
The history of the Abbey was marked by
disputes among the directors. One
dispute, caused in part by Yeats’s habitual
misreading of Ibsen as purely a social realist, concerned the kind of drama to
be produced. Martyn
and Moore, otherwise at odds, favored plays written in what everyone took to be
the realistic Ibsen style focused on contemporary subjects. Yeats, lost in the “Celtic Twilight” of the dim
and distant heroic past, might have learned from Ibsen’s mid-career decision to
abandon what might be called the “Scandinavian twilight” for contemporary
subjects, but he didn’t. Then there was
Maud Gonne who, with ambitions of being the St. Joan of Ireland, represented
the many patriots who thought the theater should propagandize the cause of
Irish independence, but Yeats, this time on the right side, insisted on an art
theater that would be above politics, national but not chauvinist or parochial.
And so, in 1905, Maud Gonne and
Douglas Hyde were replaced by Synge and Lady Gregory as co-directors with
Yeats.
Forming a limited company and owning the
majority of the shares, the three directors forced Miss Horniman’s
subsidy on the rest, who preferred their original cooperative arrangement and
who thought the backing of an Englishwoman who detested the cause of Irish
independence more a liability than an asset. In 1906 the bulk of the members, led by A.E. and Padraic
Colum, resigned and formed the Theatre of Ireland (lasting until 1912), financed by Edward Martyn. Fortunately for the Abbey, the Fays and most of the
best actors remained. In 1908, however, Yeats, egged on by Miss Horniman, had a dispute with the Pays, who could not
provide the kind of acting Yeats needed for his highly stylized plays, and they
resigned to take up careers in
As this coincided with the death of Synge,
whose plays were its strongest offering, the Abbey fell on hard times. Under
the management of Lennox Robinson, St. John Ervine, and J. A. Keough, the Abbey had a hard time of it until O’Casey came
along in the twenties to briefly revive the theater, after which it fell into a
routine of doing a relatively second-rate repertoire, partly because the
government subsidy brought with it a more Philistine board of directors and
partly because the Abbey’s directors tended to select second-rate imitations of
past successes over fresher material. Even so, many excellent actors got their
start with this group, among them Siobhan McKenna, Barry Fitzgerald, Cyril Cusack, Sara Allgood, Marie
O’Neill, Arthur Sullivan, Maureen Delaney, F. J. McCormick, and Arthur Shields.
In 1919 Yeats and Robinson bolstered the repertoire by founding the Dublin
Drama League to do contemporary foreign authors on the Abbey’s off days, but
this semi-amateur venture closed in 1928 when a more professional and full-time program of similar
intent was developed by the Dublin Gate Theatre Studio, under the leadership of
Michael MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards. With the
building of the new Abbey, the repertoire improved in quality, and the Abbey is
now one of the world’s foremost theaters.
At first the principal leaders of the Irish
dramatic movement, Yeats and Lady Gregory, seemed to be in harmony about their
overall purpose, largely because Lady Gregory was content to let Yeats have his
way in making official pronouncements about their intentions, but eventually
she went her own way in playwriting. Yeats was the theorist whose artistic
integrity and high-mindedness set an idealistic tone and whose growing
international reputation as a poet gave him public clout; Lady Gregory was the
practical-minded driving force behind the scenes, whose aristocratic
connections with Dublin Castle, seat of the colonial government, helped the
Abbey through several rough patches. Yeats wanted what he called a “Theatre of
Beauty,” featuring dramatizations of the old Irish legends that Lady Gregory,
among others, was digging up and translating. The object was to evoke the
spirit of the ancient Celt and restore him to his descendants so that the
modern bourgeois Irishman might be recalled to a more noble way of life (a goal
similar to Ibsen’s early ambition to awaken the Viking spirit in Norway by
dramatizing the old Icelandic sagas; but Ibsen had the sense to move on). The
saga material was to provide a body of story of “high kingly traditions of
undying beauty that linked the ancient myth and the life of the folk and saw in
the ancient way of life the source from which living culture and imaginative
growth should derive.”3 Yeats
wanted an aristocratic theater, a literary-poetic theater, that would remind
the people that the Irish had not always been so ignorant, so uncouth, so
money-grubbing, so cowardly, so utterly lacking in any spiritual or heroic
dimension—in short, so English. It’s no wonder the Irish sometimes took
objection to Abbey productions. Yeats thought he was doing the Irish a favor by
reminding them they had glorious ancestors, but they thought he was simply
ridiculing them.
They were further put off by the fact that
the Irish Literary Revival was run by people whose origins were not especially
Celtic—at least not Irish Celtic—and who had a mostly academic knowledge of the
tradition with which they were attempting to identify. (Like Wilde and Shaw
before them, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, and O’Casey were descendants of
Protestants who had emigrated to Ireland from England, Scotland, and elsewhere
to become its usurpers and hated rulers.)
Yeats’s plays were not especially popular, for the
most part, and the Abbey would have folded had it had nothing but the Yeats
sort of play to do. Gradually Yeats
withdrew from the Abbey stage, taking to writing esoteric, coterie plays,
modeled after the Japanese theater and Balinese dance, although in 1926 the
Abbey built a smaller theater, the Peacock Theatre, to accommodate Yeats. It
was a source of some annoyance to Yeats that the less ambitious folk comedies
of Lady Gregory, designed as curtain raisers for his plays, were much more
popular, their box-office returns even subsidizing his plays. Between 1904 and
1912, the Abbey’s heyday, fully one-fourth of the plays produced were by Lady
Gregory, with Synge’s and Yeats’s plays making up
another fourth. Other playwrights who contributed to the Abbey tradition over
the years were, among others, W. F. Casey, William Boyle, Lord Dunsany, George
Fitzmaurice, Brinsley MacNamara,
Denis Johnston, Lady Longford, M. J. Molloy, and the
three “Cork realists,” Lennox Robinson, T. C. Murray, and R. J. Ray. Others
spread the Abbey influence to other places—George Shiels,
Rutherford Mayne, Louis Dalton, and Joseph Tomelty working out of the Ulster Literary Theatre in
Belfast (opened in 1904), Paul
Vincent Carroll helping the Scottish playwright James Bridie
to found the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre (1943), and many other playwrights developing out of other regional
theaters. Though all minor dramatists, some wrote plays that were more
instrumental in shaping the typical Abbey play after 0’Casey than were those of
the major dramatists.
As for the major dramatists, Lady Gregory’s
charming, unpretentious, and frequently humorous folk dramas, followed by
Synge’s realistic folk dramas and O’Casey’s “slum
realism” plays, kept alive the Abbey’s main line of development as a “people’s
theater.” To Yeats’s dismay, the early poetic
movement changed gradually into the folk movement, and then into the realistic
and sometimes satiric tradition that followed. And thus Yeats’s
attempts to found a lofty “Theatre of Beauty” were frustrated by his
colleagues’ general refusal to write the kind of aristocratic tragedies he
desired, choosing instead to write realistic folk dramas, naturalistic urban
plays, or “kitchen comedies” that, as time went on, were played more farcically
than they were written, entertainment increasingly taking precedence over art.
Yeats admitted that though they did not set out to create such a theater, they
were the first to create a true “people’s theater.”4
But the realistic plays of Synge and
O’Casey were of a heightened realism, blended with symbolism,
that could never be called drab or middle class. The great irony is that
in refining Irish prose speech to such a high degree of musicality, Synge and
O’Casey did a better job of achieving a truly poetic drama than Yeats did with
his obviously versified plays. The secret was not to revive verse in the
theater but to bring out the poetic qualities inherent in Irish prose speech,
which, containing a residue of both Gaelic and Elizabethan rhythms and imagery,
needed only to be used evocatively. This Synge and O’Casey did admirably. And
that is why it is possible to say that if you haven’t heard an Irish play, you’ve missed
it. If this dramatic language was essentially musical, its frequent theme was
also of a sort we associate with music—”soul music,” that is. As the Jews were to the Romans, as the Slays
are to the Teutons, as the black American is to the
white American, so the Irishman is to the Englishman. To the supposed
materialism of the latter, the former oppose their supposed spirituality or
"soul." And so Irish drama, in its distinctively singing voice,
however biased, acquaints us with the difference between Irish vision and
imagination and English matter-of-factness and common sense, between Irish
spontaneity and the English obsession with duty, between Irish poetry and
English prose, between the Isle of Saints and the Isle of Manufacturers,
between Irish soul fed on the manna of word-music and English bulk fed on beef.
What “soul music” always sings about is either the people’s suffering, born of
oppression, or their essential freedom. Soul music says, “You may dominate me
physically and cause me to suffer, but my soul will always be free, and the
effect of your oppression and of my soulful freedom will be to declare my
essential superiority to you.” Of course that this can become an attitude, a
vanity, a pose contradicted by reality, lending itself to satire, accounts for
the richest Irish drama—that of Synge and O’Casey—which simultaneously
celebrates the Irish character in wondrous soul music and takes it to task for
its delusions and vanity, laughing at how incurably Anglo the Irish have
become.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: THE MASKS OF CUCHULAIN
|
William
Yeats spent his life trying to synthesize
his internal contradictions in art, hoping that life would follow art. Richard Ellmann summarizes the many seemingly contradictory selves
Yeats cultivated over the years: “We are given the nervous romantic sighing
through the reeds of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties and the worldly realist
plain-speaking in the ‘twenties; we have the businessman founding and directing
the Abbey Theatre in broad day, the wan young Celt haunting the twilight and
the occultist performing nocturnal incantations; we can choose between the
dignified Nobel Prize winner and Senator of the Irish Free State and their
successors, the libidinous old man and the translator of the Upanishads.”5 If these selves are not easily
reconcilable, Ellmann points out that Yeats himself
was partly to blame for being such a mythmaker about himself. “The
autobiographical muse enticed him only to betray him, abandoning him to
ultimate perplexity as to the meaning of his experiences. He spent much of his
life attempting to understand the deep contradictions within his mind, and was
perhaps most alive to that which separated the man of action lost in revery from the man of revery who
could not quite find himself in action. Unsure which qualities were purely Yeatsian, he posed and
attitudinized, then wondered whether pose and attitude were not more real than
what they covered over.”6
Yeats himself, in 1910, said
that “all my moral endeavor for many years has been an
attempt to recreate practical instinct in myself. I can only conceive of it as a kind of
acting.”7 Growing up
a timid modern intellectual who reasoned everything away, Yeats donned various
heroic masks, Cuchulain the hero-bard being his
favorite, so that timidity and skepticism might be conquered.
The skeptical rationalism he got from his
father, John
Yeats wrote that he remembered little of
his childhood except its pain. The oldest of four children, born near Dublin
but residing in London from 1868 to 188o, when his parents returned to Dublin
again, he spent long vacations with relatives in Sligo,
a seaport on Ireland’s northwest coast. He was a delicate, poor-sighted,
awkward, and weak child, who met with scholastic difficulty and the
bullyragging of other boys at school. Withdrawing into compensatory fantasies
of the heroic, he came to value the sort of arcane knowledge beyond the reach
of ordinary people. He loved romantic poetry and was entranced by the figure of
the magician. As a young man Yeats sought out the society of like-minded
individuals, in 1885 forming with the poet A.E. (George Russell) the Hermetic
Society, devoted to finding in the tradition of Western magic and mysticism and
Eastern religion a bulwark against the degrading materialism of modern life.
Yeats brought to all spiritualist meetings and studies a certain deliberate
credulity because, terrified of skepticism and the existential void, he was a
zealot in search of a creed. In his fifties he finally succumbed to a lifelong
temptation to violate the principle that the poet must be free of external
constraints by systematizing his spiritualist beliefs and thus binding himself
to an artificial pattern. In the context of the spiritual malaise of his time,
a malaise his countrymen were inclined to blame on English materialism and
imperialism but which had deeper roots in a general Western loss of faith, he
had hungered from the first for convictions upon which he could act. He wanted
desperately to command the kind of respect that the hero-bard of ancient times
supposedly held, listened to for a beautiful wisdom that kept communal life
evergreen and healthy. But a skeptical modern community looked less to bards
than to politicians for their renewal, and so Yeats agonized over how to become
a man of action who could somehow appeal to the very unheroic
crowd he despised.
A fantastic woman appeared, in 1889, to
preside over his transformation into a man of action, but she ended up much
more the muse of his poetry. Maud Gonne was an Amazonian beauty who, though of
wealthy English parentage, developed a violent, ruthlessly revolutionary sympathy
for the cause of Irish independence, a sympathy which, coinciding with her
desire to be a New Woman, saw her become a fabled creature of such affairs and
intrigues that had she acceded to Yeats’s passionate
desire to be her husband, she might have engulfed him even more than she did.
Mistress of a French diplomat and mother of an illegitimate daughter, Maud did
Yeats the favor of refusing his frequent proposals, marrying instead, in 1903, a military hero named MacBride, whom
she soon after separated from. When McBride was killed in the foolish heroics
of the Easter Rebellion of 1916, leaving
Maud a widow, Yeats proposed to her again and was again refused, though this
time she offered her teenage daughter, Iseult, in her
place. When Iseult turned him down, Yeats proposed to
a relative-by-marriage of Ezra Pound’s, Georgie
Hyde-Lees, an Englishwoman who provided Yeats with a normalizing family
experience, including two children, and some degree of domestic bliss. “The
marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antinomy,” was Yeats’s
quaint way of putting it.8 But she also exacerbated his
interest in spiritualism (he had passed from the Hermetics
to Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophists to a Rosicrucian society called the Golden
Dawn) by bringing to him an unexpected source of wisdom and inspiration. First
through automatic writing and then through sleep talking, Mrs. Yeats
communicated to him messages from the spirit world that Yeats happily decoded
and arranged into a great, complicated system of thought that presumed to do no
less than account for the whole of human history, which operated, according to
Yeats, on a cyclical pattern generated by the conflict of opposites. He
published this system as A Vision—in
1925 in a garbled version and in
1928 in a revised version. Yeats
conceded in his preface that the spirits were “the personalities of a dream
shared by my wife, by myself, occasionally by others,” and the system they
communicated was meant to be taken symbolically, as “stylistic arrangements of
experience” that provided “metaphors for poetry.”9 And drama.
Yeats in old age became a man of public
esteem, as senator of the Irish Free State (1922-28); recipient of a Nobel Prize (1923) and honorary degrees from
The themes of Yeats’s
poetry are the themes of his plays, as well, and almost always have some
reference to his life—to Maud and Georgie; to his
life in Dublin managing the Abbey and fighting theater battles; to his life at Thoor Ballylee (beginning in 1917),
the old Norman tower he and his wife lived in, near Lady Gregory’s Coole Park estate outside Galway; to the life of the poet
who wants to be a hero but who finds the aristocratic system that valued his
kind of heroism on the wane; to a man who feels “out of sync” with his age.
Bedeviled by the limitations of physical existence with all its claims of
society, friends, lovers, and the aging process, yet enthralled with the
possibilities of superhuman transcendence through the creative use of the
imagination, Yeats bemoaned all that would kill the passionate heroic spirit he
felt within him and celebrated all that would liberate or acknowledge that
spirit. His vision was generally tragic because his sense of defeat, of heroic
loss, was always greater than his sense of victory, but he aimed at what he
called “tragic joy,” that moment when, as A. S. Knowland
says, “the individual’s temporal gesture of completion coincides with the
timeless perfection of death,” or as John Rees Moore puts it, when one feels
“the pity, terror, and wonder of loving and dying with appropriate grandeur.”12 Yeats was most typical when he was most
paradoxical, dramatizing the ambivalences of hatred in love, creativity in
death, disbelief in belief, or the heroic gesture turning back on
itself—negation “positivized” or positivity
negated. He specialized in the irruption of the superhuman into the mundane
human world and the clash of values that resulted. Sometimes he portrayed this
in the conflict of relatively flesh-and-blood characters, but more often, and
progressively, the characters were replaced by spiritual entities—heroic
figures out of myth or legend, archetypal figures from timeless folklore, or
figures suggestive of generalized qualities. Yet as his drama became more
abstract in form, its content became more realistic, as Yeats tried to come to
grips with “the complexities of mire and blood”13 of earthly existence.
In formal matters, Yeats was just a little
ahead of his time (as was Gordon Craig, who collaborated with Yeats on many of
his productions), for many of his ideas about theater became accepted by the
“Theater of the Absurd” and the “total theater” movements of the fifties,
sixties, and seventies. What Yeats was after was an aggressively anti-realistic
theater. He did not want his audience to get lost in the busy, trivial detail
of individual, prosaic, bourgeois existence, as he thought one did in modern
realistic plays; rather, he wanted his audience to break through the barriers
of time and place to a realm of experience that is eternally valid and to
connect up with the great life spirit that he believed mysteriously haunts the
ages and makes our human destiny inevitably tragic. To accomplish this, he
fashioned an abstract, poetic drama that would restore beautiful speech in the
theater, simplify acting by eliminating the “needless” gestures and stage
business of realistic characterization, and simplify the set by eliminating all
the distracting detail of realistic stage design. In restoring dance and song,
mask and chorus, and abstract design to the theater, he wanted to achieve a
kind of purity of line and color, form and speech, that would evoke the eternal
archetypes and involve us in general actions of mythic significance. He wanted
the actors to be as still as priests before an altar, moving only
ritualistically, chanting rhythmically the beautiful, magic words that were to
evoke a lost heroic world or a world of superhuman transcendence.
Of Yeats’s
twenty-six plays in his Collected
Plays, nine are cast in a fairly poetic prose, and the rest
are mostly or wholly in verse. At least three plays—Cathleen ni Houlihan
(1902), The Pot of Broth
(1904), and The Unicorn from the
Stars (1908)—probably owe as much to Lady Gregory as to Yeats, and
she contributed to several others in serving as his amanuensis, but she
declined to have her name on them because the thought, she said, was more Yeats’s than hers, however much the actual writing,
especially the dialect, was hers. Two other plays were free translations of Sophoclean plays, leaving less
than twenty plays that Yeats could call his own. Even then the frequent
revision of many of these plays reveals how often theater artists served as his
collaborators, their practical applications forcing him to reconsider. This
tendency to revise suggests not only his uncertainty as a playwright but also
his determination to experiment. His plays are therefore difficult to date,
many appearing in different versions, the dates listed here being those of the Collected Plays.
The story lines of his early plays are
fairly typical of Yeatsian concerns throughout his
career, though he much improved his technique. The Countess Cathleen, typical in its composition, was
conceived in 1885 and begun in prose in 1889, the year he met Maud Gonne, then
revised for its 1892 publication as a verse play and subsequently revised at
least five more times. Its original emphasis was on the story of a rich
noblewoman who sells her soul to the devil in order to save the Irish from
starvation, but when Maud rejected Yeats he shifted some of the emphasis to
Cathleen’s rejection of a poet named Aleel (or
Kevin), who would have Cathleen raise children while he raised Ireland with his
idealistic poetry. Yeats quite understandably saw the problems of “Mother
The
Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) was one of Yeats’s few Abbey successes,
probably because it uncharacteristically called for patriotic action. Cathleen
(originally played impressively by the statuesque Maud Gonne as a “Mother
Ireland” figure) is here a mysterious, wronged Old Woman who arrives at a
cottage the day before a young man’s marriage is to take place, mesmerizing him
into rejecting such domesticity for the hard life of following her in her cause
of fighting off strangers who have taken her land, the siren call of
nationalism being stronger than the love of any particular woman. When a few
Irish finally took seriously the idea of driving out the English in the Easter
Rebellion of 1916, Yeats wrote
in dismay: “Did that play of mine send out /Certain
men the English shot?”14
The Shadowy
Waters (1899-1900, but
1911 for the acting version),
written in the year of Yeats’s “mystic betrothal” to
Maud Gonne, tells of a pirate’s magically achieving ideal love with a captured
queen. In a highly stylized form—”more a
ritual than a human story,” Yeats called it15—Forgael’s passionate search for
superhuman experience is paradoxically achieved in a union with a woman, Dectora, whose image he has evoked in a poem.
The King’s
Threshold (1904) finds Yeats for the first time
patterning a play after Greek models. It dramatizes the last hour of the poet Seanchan, situated at the threshold of the king’s palace,
where, in a series of temptations, “opposing visions and values meet, interact,
and illuminate each other.”16
Dealing with the relation of the poet to society, it finds the poet’s
superiority lies in his transcendence of the practical matters that bring
ordinary mortals to ruin, and especially in his poetry’s spiritual triumph over
physical death.
Through
such plays as On Baile’s
Strand (1904), Deirdre
(1907), The Unicorn from the
Stars (1908), The Green
Helmet (1910), The
Hour Glass (1914), and
The Player Queen (produced
1919, published 1922), Yeats
continued to struggle with dramatic form, experimenting with masks, dance, and
other means of achieving a visual impact that would offset the traditional
grand manner of the verse play and the psychological naturalism of its
contemporary characterization. The turning point came when Ezra Pound, around
1914, introduced him to the
Japanese No theater, from whose tradition Yeats took what he needed to develop
the more abstract drama he sought, a drama that, in Moore’s words, “‘purifies’
character into symbol, transforms scene into emblem, and condenses action into
epiphany,”17
producing what Knowland terms, “a drama of psychic
essences acted out in what Yeats called the deeps of the mind.”18 Plot summaries seem especially
ineffective with such plays, their conflicts being of spiritual essences that
exist out of time and place. Yeats liked the No emphasis on a connoisseur’s
knowledge of artistic tradition, but, as Moore explains, “the Noh offered an
example of a highly civilized poetic refinement that yet retained the
attraction of simple fairy-tale or folklore. Here was a way to bring together
the culture of ‘the people’ and the aesthetic distinction of the knowledgeable
artist without sacrificing the virtues of either.”19 Such No features as a spiritual quest, an encounter with
the supernatural, a moment of choice between two worlds, a climactic dance, as
well as its use of mask and chorus, reinforced Yeats’s
earlier experiments, assisted by Gordon Craig, to produce the mature dramas,
some of them labeled “dance plays,” of At the Hawk’s Well (1917), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), The Resurrection (1931), A Full Moon in March (1935), The Herne’s Egg (1938),
Purgatory (1939), and others.
Of particular interest, and representative
of Yeats’s entire drama, are the five plays dealing
with Yeats’s favorite saga hero, Cuchulain,
which seem to form a cycle illustrative of Yeats’s
theories of history and human personality—At the Hawk’s Well (1917), The Green Helmet (1910), On Baile’s Strand (1903), The Only Jealousy of Emer
(1919), and The Death of Cuchulain
(1938), arranged here according to the chronology of Cuchulain’s
life. Though Yeats began in the middle of Cuchulain’s
story, then went back to the beginning before going forward, the five plays
eventually cover the career of the mythic hero from the conception of his son
by the Scottish warrior queen, Aoife, to his
unwitting killing of that son, his subsequent madness and revival at the hands
of his wife Emer, and finally, years later, his
death. Reg Skene, in his study of these plays, finds that as they
enact the life of a Celtic warrior from his initiation to his death, they also
evoke myths that tell of the moon’s changes in a single lunar month and of the
sun’s changes in a single solar year, as well as the progress of the individual
soul in the course of a single incarnation, the idea being to reveal those
problematic moments in the process of life when the individual achieves
identity with the universe.20
The plays thus serve a fundamentally religious purpose in providing ritual
reenactments of archetypal events that reinforce a faith in the rightness of
creation. From the beginning, Yeats had thought of his kind of drama not only
as a schooling in heroism but as “the preparation of a priesthood.”21 “I
always feel that my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith,” said
Yeats, seeking to recover the communal magic of the Dionysian theater.22
In light of such ambitious plans, it’s
interesting to look at atypical work that seems more accommodating, such as the
comic play The Cat and the Moon
(1926) and the ironically
realistic The Words upon the
Window-Pane (1934). Though
a note of mockery and satire had entered his work as early as 1910, it is rare to find the spirit of
comedy dominating a Yeats play as it does The Cat and the Moon. Based on the Japanese Kyogen drama, which consisted of brief farces in colloquial
language employed as interludes between No dramas, The Cat and the Moon presents an amusing cat, “symbol of
normal man, belly to the ground and pupil to the sky, creeping around aimlessly
seeking his opposite in a moon that spins round like a child’s top.”23 The play’s human parallels, a
Lame Beggar and a Blind Beggar, in undergoing comic routines of a painful
nature, portend the Beckettian bums of the future. The Words upon the Window-Pane,
written as a tribute to Lady Gregory and their platonic love, is the only
realistic play Yeats wrote, but it cleverly subverts its own realism with a
play-within-a-play that asserts the primacy of the spirit world. Arriving at a
séance, a group of characters realistically portrayed attempt to evoke spirits
useful to them but are interrupted by the raging spirit of Jonathan Swift, who
agonizes over his tragically barren love affair with a woman who lived in this
house. Swift desperately seeks to justify his refusal to procreate in a
prediction of the degeneracy of history. In the juxtaposition of ignoble modern
and more noble eighteenth-century attitudes and values, and the shocking
irruption of timeless spiritual forces into a temporal world, familiar Yeatsian themes are played out, but in this case in a
manner more accessible to “the people” and perhaps more convincing as
well. This play reveals the path Yeats
might have taken, a path that might have led to
greater drama.
It is unlikely that Yeats’s
plays will be much more acted in the future than they have been to date, not
only because of their own limitations and difficulties, but because better
playwrights have come along who learned and borrowed from him, producing so
much better work with his own tools, though ironically often contemptuous of
the language he thought supreme. And so his own progeny crowd him out, a
fitting end for a man more than half in love with heroic defeat and the
spiritual victories one can snatch from it.
Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) has become
as fabled a creature as the mythic types she resuscitated, for she lived a life
of transformations. She seems to have been something of both a Cinderella and a
Sleeping Beauty, though the beauty that slept was more an intellectual beauty,
one of talent and ability.
Raised on the vast, working estate of the Persses called Roxborough, near
Galway, Isabella Augusta Persse, twelfth of sixteen
children, though somewhat lost among all those offspring, was fully fed the
rich imaginative life of the estate’s many peasants and servants with whom she
was in daily contact; but she was starved for books and other intellectual
stimulation. Those were at last supplied to her in 188o by her Cinderella
marriage, at age twenty-eight, to the widower Sir William Gregory, at age
sixty-three somewhat advanced in years for Prince Charming but otherwise a
great catch—a former member of Parliament and recently retired as governor of
Ceylon, a classical scholar of artistic interests and friend to many
stimulating people in art and politics. Once married she embarked on a
twelve-year awakening, as he led her about the world, with long stays in
Ceylon, India, Egypt, Spain, Italy, and their home base in London, she eagerly
absorbing culture and a political education while developing a polished social
sense. Though a weakness for gambling had caused him to lose properties, and
would leave her short of cash after his death, he still owned real estate
around Galway, particularly Coole Park, destined to
become “the workshop of Ireland”24
in its literary renaissance, and Yeats’s favorite
retreat.
The Gregorys and Persses were mainly descended from that Protestant horde
that came over with Cromwell in the seventeenth century and usurped the land.
The centuries had made them Irish, some actually came to feel sympathy for the
oppressed, landless natives, but most, particularly the more provincial Perrses, stood steadfast in favor of Anglo-Irish dominion
and Protestant proselytizing. Though the Gregorys
were more worldly, urbane, and tolerant, William spending more time abroad or
in
Shortly after her husband’s death in 1892
and about the time her reading of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight and Douglas
Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht
inspired her to recall the folklore she had learned as a child at Roxborough, Lady Gregory was sent in a fateful direction by
the desire of her ten-year-old son to learn the Irish he heard spoken by the
peasantry; she obliged by learning it herself. This was to lead to her becoming
the chief collector, translator, and popularizer of
the old folk stories and stories from the Irish heroic cycles, publishing two
volumes of saga material, Cuchulain of
Muirthemne in 1902 and Gods and Fighting Men in 1904, and several folklore collections, Poets and Dreamers in 1903 and Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
in 1920, among others, which
supplied Yeats and other writers with a fund of inspiration. She wisely
translated, not into standard English, but into the Kiltartan
dialect of her neighborhood, that dialect which, with its residue of both
Celtic and Elizabethan syntax and imagery, allows the Irish to be blunt with
one another in such a charmingly musical and roundabout way. It caught the
imagination of the people as Yeats’s sophisticated
verse never could and reinforced the efforts of Synge to identify and create a
native tongue. She visited the Aran Isles at the same
time Synge first did, by the way (1898), but they curiously avoided one another
in their common pursuit of folkways.
Generally she found her way, not by
avoiding genius, but by inviting it to
Though she began as hostess and organizer
of the movement, her own work being in folklore, she soon found herself caught
up in supplying the native drama their plans called for, first as Yeats’s amanuensis suggesting a word here and there, then
as collaborator with Yeats, Hyde, and Moore, and eventually as dramatist in her
own right. She temporarily dropped out of the movement’s management when Yeats
joined with the Fays to create the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903, only to be called back to play a
leading role when Miss Horniman’s setting up of the
Abbey required a resident of Ireland to be listed as patentee. Lady Gregory not
only filled that role but, in 1905, joined
Yeats and Synge in the directorship, which forced her into increasing
involvement with Abbey management for many years to come, taking on, as
Elizabeth Coxhead says, “rather more than her share
in the long struggle to get the theatre established on a sound financial basis,
to find it new playwrights, and to secure for them all, but for Synge
especially, complete freedom of speech.”26
In the brief interim when she had no
management role, Lady Gregory in 1901-1902 attempted her first play, Colman and Guaire,
a verse account designed for school children of the legend of St. Colman’s
birth, and then wrote what was to be her first produced play, Twenty-Five (later revised as On the Racecourse), which
in 1903 formed part of the
repertoire of the company’s first visit to London, spreading the Abbey’s fame
abroad. The play shows a young man deliberately losing at cards to save the
husband of his former sweetheart from ruin, an act of romantic love that she
thought so false to the unromantic peasantry that she later disowned the play,
wanting only to write honestly.
The Abbey opened in 1904 with Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand, a contemplative poetic tragedy that Yeats hoped would put the
audience into “an ever-deepening reverie,” and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News, which,
as Elizabeth Coxhead says, must have awakened them
with a bang.27 It was
the sort of boisterous but classically contained comedy that earned her the
title “the Irish Molière,” although this appellation
acknowledged as well her translating of Molière. Her
comedies, mostly one-acts, would often begin with a “what if” sort of
question—as in Spreading the News:
what if a message delivered at a fair were garbled in passing?—and then
show how human character leads to a preposterous but logical development. In Spreading the News
misunderstanding multiplies upon misunderstanding until the most innocent of
actions, Bartley Fallon’s attempt to return to Jack Smith the pitchfork Jack
left at the fair, leads to Bartley’s being misrepresented as Jack’s murderer on
account of a love affair with Jack’s wife. As Mrs. Tarpley,
the apple seller, says to the magistrate at the very beginning, the chief
business of this small town is “minding one another’s business,” the people
having “no trade at all but to be talking.” But their need to dramatize
things, and their skill at it, leads them to a very overwrought account of
reality. It has been often said that Lady Gregory’s plays show how the Irish
get caught in their own mythmaking. It's no accident that "Cloon" sounds rather like "clown."
Hyacinth Halvey
(1906) reverses the action of Spreading the News by having the
title character, arriving in the town of
The
Workhouse Ward (1908) finds two crusty old men, sharing a
ward in Cloon Workhouse, living on their hatred for
one another. When a benevolent sister arrives to rescue them from their
unceasing strife by taking one of them home, the two men realize that it is
only their verbal sparring that makes life worth living, and so they drive her
off and joyously resume their heroic struggle. Most of the plays written in
this vein have “a ‘ballad structure,’ a folk-tale
simplicity with a psychologically valid twist at the end, rather like the
stories of Guy de Maupassant or 0’Henry.”28
The Canavans (1906) may be her best full-length play, and
it is of the type that got her a reputation for being the inventor of the
folk-history play, though the account she gives here of Queen Elizabeth’s
dominion in Ireland through the agency of Lord Essex is less history than folk
imagination. The folk told her that “Queen Elizabeth was awful. Beyond
everything she was,”29
and she contents herself with presenting the comic consequences of that view.
The intricate plot concerns one Peter Canavan, a rich
but cowardly miller, who has been appointed mayor of Scartana
by Lord Essex. Peter’s concern for safety first, in a time of political
turmoil, when Irish rebels are fighting a guerrilla war against the queen’s
troops, makes him extremely skittish and afraid to commit himself, for he
wishes always to be on the strongest side. With the aid of two busybody widows
and his brother Anthony, a deserter from the queen’s army, Peter gets involved
in a comic plot of false appearances and sudden reversals, ending in his
supposed discovery that he need not look elsewhere for strength, for he is the
strongest of all.
Another of her major folk-history comedies
is The White Cockade (1905), a version of James II’s escape from Ireland after the Battle of the Boyne, though
here she employs serio-comedy to convey the rueful
defeat of the ideal of loyalty, as an inadequate king becomes a figure of fun.
Synge said of this play that “it had made the writing of historical dramas
possible again.”30
Such spirited comedies were immensely
popular with Abbey audiences and are the most frequently revived and
anthologized of her plays, the ones on which her reputation as a dramatist
largely rests. But she wrote thirty-five plays in all, not counting
translations, collaborations, and adaptations, and many were not comedies.
Among her folk-history plays, for example, were such tragedies as Kincora,
Devorgilla,
and Grania,
studies of frustrated womanhood in ancient settings. Their novelty was in
“half-legendary history treated not in a remote or cloudy way, but vividly and
topically, [their] characters speaking in accents not very different from those
of the
Kincora (1905) tells of the troubles of Brian Boru,
unifier of Ireland, betrayed to the Danes by his Lady Macbeth of a wife, Gormleith; Devorgilla (1907) deals with the remorse of the
woman blamed for the original sin of bringing the English into Ireland, and her
finding in old age that the young of Ireland cannot forgive her for the act of
infidelity to a king that supposedly caused Henry II to invade Ireland in the
twelfth century to quell the resulting civil war. Crania (1912), possibly more directly autobiographical than most of her
work, shows Grania abandoning old King Finn on the
brink of marriage to him to run off with her true love, young Diarmuid, but finding after many years of exile and
hardship that Diarmuid and Finn care more for each
other and their brotherhood of warriors than they do for her. Elizabeth Coxhead has speculated that the modern equivalent of this
circle of warriors “was the masculine society of clubs and bars, of wit and
talk and stimulus, from which a woman, through her talent as much a part of the
movement as any of them, would be excluded. As an artist, needing to share,
deserving to share, how could she fail to experience the frustrations that have
been sublimated in the character of Grania?”32 That Lady Gregory suppressed this play throughout her
life may indeed express her need to hide a certain
resentment.
Her most frequently produced play has been The Rising of the Moon (1907), no
doubt because it is more explicitly nationalist than most of her work. A
political fugitive is allowed to escape when the policeman on watch is made to
realize that deep down he’s a patriot at heart and cares more for Irish freedom
than English law and order, a theme expressive of the wishful thinking of the
day that even the police were secretly rebels.
Her playwriting during the Great War took a
turn toward fable, fairy tale, and allegory. Supposedly designed for children,
such fairy plays, or “wonder plays,” as The Golden Apple (1916)
and The Dragon (1917) carried an undercurrent of
social satire that made them adult fare as well. She then closed with a number
of religious plays, written largely to inspire love in a country torn by hatred
and factional strife. The Story
Brought by Brigit (1923-24),
a modern passion play, draws
a parallel between Roman-occupied Palestine and English-occupied Ireland; Sancho’s Master (1927) celebrates the
idealism of Don Quixote; and her last play, Dave (1927), a modern miracle play, suggests that the true
measure of the worth of individuals is in their service to humanity, not in
titles, family trees, or wealth, and that therefore even an outcast can find
blessedness in such service. Optimism prevails as justice triumphs, the
wretched are saved, and ordinary people are transformed by the general miracle
of redemption. Having experienced her own wonderful transformations, Lady
Gregory may be forgiven for the rather pietistic nature of these last plays.
It is more difficult to forgive Yeats for
not according Lady Gregory the homage that was her due after her death and for
not squelching the rumormongers who denigrated her. Her part in the collaboration
with Yeats and Hyde was doubted, it was
insinuated that Yeats wrote several of her best plays, and in general she was
derided as a bit of a dragon in her management of the Abbey and was compared
with the hated “famine queen,” Queen Victoria, whom she did resemble in build
and dress. Lady Gregory undoubtedly had her failures of judgment and execution,
but this besmirching of her reputation was uncalled for. As the years rolled by
and Yeats more and more withdrew from Abbey concerns, it was largely Lady
Gregory whose tenacity and good sense in management kept the Abbey going. For
the most part, she was queenly in the best sense, so often very kind and
generous toward the starving artists around her and not afraid to do the hard
things necessary of her, not afraid to stoop (Shaw called her “the charwoman of
the Abbey” for the way she took care of the dirty details).
She overcame great personal losses—the
death of her favorite nephew, Hugh Lane, in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915,
the death of her beloved son
in 1918, shot down over Italy in the war, the loss of Coole
Park when her daughter-in-law was forced to sell it, the murder of relatives
and the burning of Roxborough during the civil war,
and her own losing bout with aging and disease, not to mention all the
attrition of spirit she must have experienced in fighting over and over the
Abbey’s battles. She was the subject of calumny from a certain quarter because
she supported Yeats in his insistence that the Abbey be a writers’ theater,
controlled by those who initiate the creative process. And because she was for
both peace and independence, she found herself often slandered on this middle
ground by both the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the violent rebels. In the midst
of such turmoil and stress, it’s a miracle the Abbey survived at all, but it
did because Lady Gregory was one of those women who, without uttering a single
feminist slogan or spending one suffragette night in jail, constantly
demonstrated the truth of the women’s cause by sheer capability. Over the long
haul, she was more indispensable to the Abbey than was Yeats. And the question
who was the best Abbey playwright after Synge and O’Casey seems more and more
an open question, with Lady Gregory as likely as Yeats or anyone else.
When Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the Fays
called for young native dramatists to spring up, in John Millington Synge
(1871-1909) they got both more and less than they asked for. He was a greater
dramatist than they had any right to expect would appear so suddenly, but the
movement got less out of him than it should have, partly because he died so
young and partly because his sardonically truthful plays were at first more a
liability than an asset when “patriotism” meant telling lies about one’s
country.
It didn’t help with the nationalists that
like Yeats and Lady Gregory, Synge was a descendant of that Protestant
land-owning class that invaded in the seventeenth century. The family seat,
belonging to Synge’s uncle, was
The Synges were
also known for their churchmen. Fervid, proselytizing Protestants, the Synges did not need any more evangelical zealotry in the
family, but they got it when Synge’s father married Synge’s mother, daughter of
Robert Traill, a passionate denouncer of things
papist. She relentlessly hammered her father’s doctrines of sin and hellfire
damnation into her five children, who all shaped up as wished except John, her
youngest. John’s teenage reaction to both the exploitative landlordism and the
intolerant, scarifying religion of his family was one of revulsion and
rejection. The oft-noted morbidity of Synge’s vision seems to owe less to his
affliction with asthma and the terminal Hodgkin’s disease than to the parental
emphasis on death and damnation in his childhood. As Synge wrote, “the
well-meant but extraordinary cruelty of introducing the idea of Hell into the
imagination of a nervous child has probably caused more misery than many
customs that the same people send missionaries to eradicate.”33
Synge’s revulsion combined with his amateur
naturalist’s interest in Darwinian evolution to force him to publicly renounce
Christianity in 1889, to the
horror of his family; but gradually his religious sense replaced the lost
religion with something between Wordsworthian Nature
mysticism and Shavian Life Force worship. As he later wrote:
No one pretends to ignore the bitterness of disease and death. It is an
immense, infinite horror; and the more we learn to set the real value on the
vitality of life the more we dread death. Yet any horror is better than the
stagnation of belief. . . . The
people who rebel from the law of God are not those who linger in the aisles
droning their withered chants with senile intonation. . . . In the Christian synthesis each separate
faculty has been dying of atrophy. . . .
The only truth a wave knows is that it is going to break. The only truth
a bud knows is that it is going to expand and flower. The only truth we know is
that we are a flood of magnificent life, the fruit of some frenzy of the earth.34
Synge further alienated his family by
taking up music as his profession, attending classes in musical theory, violin,
and composition at the
Yeats had been visiting Maud Gonne in
Paris, where she had decamped to avoid arrest for leading boycotts among the
Irish peasantry, and he joined her in forming the Irish League (1897), aiming
to enlist French sympathy for the cause of Irish independence. Synge was
persuaded to join but only a few months later sent Maud a letter of
resignation, saying: “My theory of regeneration for
In five successive summers, spending
four-and-a-half months there altogether, Synge immersed himself in the life of
the Aran Isles, listening to the stories of the schanachie
(Irish storytellers who were inheritors of a long oral tradition), gaining
respect for the persistence of these people in the face of unceasing hardship
and danger, and meditating on how this particular life was connected to the
cosmos and universal human experience, finding many parallels between the
ancient myths, legends, and fables of other lands and those of the Aran Isles. Viewing what he thought was a life only
recently fallen from paradise, he experienced a kind of artistic paradise in
being able to transmute the fact of this existence into an imaginative truth.
Though he could speak Irish, Synge was more
impressed with the natives’ blending of English and Irish into a living
national tongue, and it was this dialect, synthesized with the dialect of West
Kerry peasants he later visited and the Kiltartan
dialect Lady Gregory introduced him to, that formed the richly musical prose
dialogue of most of his plays. He was not much interested in digging up the
folklore past, especially for its own sake, but rather was fascinated by the
life of a particular flesh-and-blood people, a life somehow retaining some of
the simple nobility of an earlier peasant culture, one we call “primitive” but
one Synge felt was fundamentally more civilized than modern bourgeois society.
He once wrote, of Yeats’s “Celtic Twilight”: “I do
not believe in the possibility of ‘a purely fantastic, unmodern,
ideal, breezy, spring-dayish, Cuchulainoid
National Theatre.’ . . . No drama can grow out of anything other
than the fundamental realities of life which are never fantastic, are neither
modern nor unmodern and, as I see them, rarely
spring-dayish, or breezy or Cuchulainoid.”36 On
the Aran Isles he sought, not the dream-heroes of the
past, but a living example of the past that not only survived in the modern
world but showed in some essential ways how the modern world might do better.
He was not immediately transformed into a
major writer by his experiences here, nor did his account, The Aran Isles,
completed in 1901, find a
publisher until 1907, but after
a few more false starts (his play When
the Moon Has Set, 1896-1901, was rejected for production by Yeats and Lady Gregory, and
several verse plays were left uncompleted), he finally emerged as the Irish
dramatic movement’s greatest playwright. In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and Riders to the Sea
(1904) were his first produced
plays, by the Fays’ Irish National Theatre Society; thenceforth all but one of
his plays were introduced by the Abbey.
When Yeats arranged the transformation of
the Abbey from a cooperative society to a limited company in 1905, Synge joined him and Lady Gregory as
directors and participated as much as possible in the management and practical
life of the theater. This effort was somewhat compromised by his falling in
love with Molly Allgood (stage name: Marie O’Neill),
sister of the Abbey’s leading actress, Sara Allgood.
Always more at home with women than men, Synge had had a long string of lady
friends, but twice he was rejected for marriage and at other times for anything
more than friendship, resulting in much heartache and the theme of unrequited
love in his works. He was fatally attracted to women who, through religious
conviction or cultural background, found his “advanced ideas” anathema, and
Molly was no exception. Molly’s lack of education, her Catholic background,
relative youth (fifteen years younger), and love of apparently innocent
flirting gave Synge much aggravation, and he wasted too much of his time
writing jealous, chiding love letters. Even so, after a long campaign to get
his mother to accept Molly, their secret engagement was finally acknowledged.
But the mismatch never came off owing to Synge’s last illness.
The six plays that form the heart of
Synge’s effort can be classified conventionally as tragedies or comedies, with Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows being
tragedies and the rest bitter comedies. The comedies might further be
identified as “extravaganzas,” but when Synge applied that term to one of his
plays, he found, as Shaw had earlier, that people associated the extravaganza
with frivolity. Classifying according to their sources, Robin Skelton calls Riders, In the Shadow of the Glen,
The Tinker’s Wedding, and
The Playboy of the Western World
“schanachie plays” because they were inspired by stories told Synge by
Irish storytellers;37 of the remaining two, The Well of the Saints seems to have been based on an old
French farce and Deirdre on
heroic myth. All six plays, however, are experiments with a highly rhythmic
language and a free-form dramatic structure, in accordance with Synge’s view of
the symphonic and musical nature of existence.
The one-act Riders to the Sea appears to be the first of Synge’s major
plays to be completed, though the second produced, and it is the only one
actually set in the Aran Isles. Containing many
ironic parallels to Yeats’s recently produced Cathleen ni Houlihan, the
play shows Synge reacting against Yeats’s call to
arms and the promise of heroic immortality to those who serve “Mother Ireland.”38 In Riders the enemy is not England or
foreign usurpers but the sea as a symbol of the cosmos, and the struggle is
more elemental, with death as the inevitable outcome and resignation as the
only possible response. A counter-portrait of “Mother Ireland,” Maurya, an old woman who has lost her husband, her
husband’s father, and five sons to the sea, the latest being Michael, missing
at sea for many days, seeks to prevent the drowning of her sixth and last son,
Bartley. But Bartley insists on fulfilling his role as man of the house by
taking horses across the water to sell at a mainland fair, and the angry Maurya cannot bring herself to give him her blessing. When,
relenting, she hastens to catch up with him, she is so shocked at seeing the
specter of the dead Michael on a gray horse riding behind Bartley that she
fails again to deliver the blessing. She returns to her cottage to learn that
the body of Michael has been found and buried in the far north, and as men
carry in the drowned corpse of Bartley, she learns that the gray horse knocked
Bartley into the sea. Amid the keening of neighboring men and women, Maurya performs last rites, as much pagan as Christian,
over the remains of Michael and Bartley, and asks for mercy on them and “on the
soul of everyone is left living in the world. . . . No man at all can be
living forever, and we must be satisfied.” Crammed with allusions to Greek and
other pagan myth, and with the keening people forming a Sophoclean
chorus of lament, the play seeks to present an embodiment of man’s universal
dilemma of mortality, his inability to control the great natural forces that
drive at this planet.
In the
Shadow of the Glen, another
one-acter, does not have the mythic universality of
Riders, but in its
tone of comic irony and ambiguity it is more representative of Synge’s
subsequent production. Here Synge modified a schanachie story to suggest a connection
with the classical folktale of the Widow of