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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
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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
A two-act “rollicking farce,” The Tinker’s Wedding, written
between 1902 and 1906, was not
produced until 1909, after
Synge’s death, and then not in
A short three-acter,
The Well of the Saints,
begun in 1903 and completed in 1905,
is a departure in that it is based, not on schanachie stories,
but on an old French story, however much Synge’s Irish experience reinforced
it. Described as “essentially a psychological drama, in which the alternations
of attitude and mood provide the dramatic rhythm, rather than the events which
stimulate these movements,"43
the play tells of the blind Douls, man and wife, who,
their sight temporarily restored by a visiting saint, decide against permanent
restoration when sight of the world horrifies and saddens them. Blind their
lifelong, Martin and Mary Doul in old age have
arrived at a kind of happiness based on there being nothing to contradict their
idealized vision of one another. But still there is a hankering to see the
world as others see it. When the saint gives them temporary vision, they find
the world of the sighted “disadvantaged” (our word) by the inability to see
beyond appearances. Finding each other ugly, in sighted terms, they quarrel and
split, until growing blindness begins to return to them a sight more
valuable—the vision of the ideal—and they rejoin each other, forevermore
committed to a blindness to mere externals. Preferring to suffer physical
privation than lose their dream, the Douls assert
their right to choose their own way of life, a way superior to conventional
notions of reality and priorities.44
Synge’s love of comparative mythology led him next into daring
juxtapositions of story material—The
Playboy of the Western World (1904-1906) contains a strange
synthesis of Irish folkways, Greek drama (Oedipus Rex, in particular), Spanish fiction (Don Quixote), and Christian story.
First produced in 1907, The Playboy
inspired rioting in both
Set in the village of Mayo, the story at
first seems centered on Pegeen Mike (played first by
Molly Allgood), one of Synge’s young women who have
the imagination to envision a more glorious life and the energy to pursue it,
but fatal inhibitions that prevent them from realizing their own dream. When
her father leaves one night to attend a wake for the partying that comes with
it, and her cowardly fiancé, Shawn Keough, refuses to
stay alone with her at her father’s pub for fear of offending the holy fathers
of the Church, not to mention his fear of the dark, she in her exasperation
with the men in her life is ripe for escape. Escape soon comes in the form of
what is supposedly a criminal on the run, one Christy Mahon, whose trembling
figure is not much to behold at first, but who becomes greater and bolder with
each recitation of his story of having killed his tyrannous father, Old Mahon,
a talent for storytelling such as Christy’s being highly valued in this
stimulus-starved, language-dependent community. Others arrive to listen to his
glorious deed, Pegeen becoming increasingly
proprietary toward Christy and the heroic myth she has been fostering in him. Pegeen and Christy ultimately recognize each other as soul
mates in their passionate and poetic way with words. But Pegeen,
by promoting the heroic size of her beloved, does not realize what a
Frankenstein’s monster she is creating.
As
Christy is busy living up to his newfound reputation by winning all the games
at a local sports festival, Old Mahon appears at the pub, his head bandaged but
otherwise hale and hearty, declaring Christy a fraud at murder. When Christy
returns as celebrated champion of the games and finds his father still alive,
he feels he can do no less than vindicate his reputation and so appears to kill
his father a second time with a blow to the head. The villagers are horrified
at seeing their vision of heroism realized, for “there’s a great gap between a
gallous story and a dirty deed,”45
and they turn on Christy, tying him up for the police and threatening the
gallows. In her sharp disappointment, Pegeen leads
the persecution, burning Christy’s leg with fired sod.
But
Old Mahon, who has survived a second blow and has at last gained respect for a
son who would so assert himself, intervenes, declaring that he and Christy will
leave together, enjoying themselves by “telling stories of the villainy of
Mayo, and the fools is here”(8o). Christy reconciles with his father, but only
by putting him in his place, and then departs with blessings upon Mayo, “for
you’ve turned me into a likely gaffer after all, the way I’ll go romancing
through a romping lifetime”(8o). Realizing her loss, Pegeen
ends the play with a wild lament. “Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost
the only Playboy of the Western World”(8o). As a
“playboy” could refer to either a hoaxer (con man) or a hurling champion, and
“Western World” occurs frequently in early Irish texts as part of an epithet
for a champion, her lament may signal the ambiguous nature of Christy Mahon,
whose stature as hero is both fake and real, depending upon one’s view. The
play seems to point ultimately to the role of language in creating human
greatness through its inspiring embodiment of idealistic vision, however
comically distorted by the limitations of the people, and to the spiritual
impoverishment of a people who cannot accept the reality of their own dream of
destroying the authority of the fathers. They prefer to be enslaved by all
those fathers who stand behind English law, Western materialism, and Christian
doctrine than to take the daring step of realizing the spiritual power of their
own instinctive rebellion against these things. In Synge’s view, they prefer to
be more dead than alive. One can easily see how this view of things would be
buttressed by a pattern of allusion to quixotic idealism, Oedipal rebellion,
and Christ’s betrayal.46 In this
more universal context, “Western World” may be directed at the entire patriarchal
realm.
For his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, begun
in 1907 but never entirely finished (though directed by Molly in 1910 in a
version patched up by Yeats and Lady Gregory), Synge strangely reverted to the
“Cuchulanoid” sort of verse play he had earlier
rejected, attempting once again “to solve the problem of presenting poetry in
native idiom.”47
Perhaps tired of
either the realistic-symbolic manner of his plays or of the turmoil they
created, Synge expressed a desire to do something quite different: “I want to
do something quiet and stately and restrained.”48 But, as Skelton points out, “restraint
and stateliness did not come easily to Synge as a writer. In attempting these
qualities he excluded much from his play that might have increased both its vitality
and tension.”49 From
an eighth- or ninth-century myth, the story is of Deirdre, prophesied from
birth to bring trouble upon
Synge was unfairly denigrated during his
lifetime for writing drama that lacked patriotism. Part of the charge was laid
at the satiric realism that supposedly characterized his work. Certainly
Synge’s plays seem realistic in comparison with Yeats’s
plays, and the presence of a realistic movement undoubtedly shaped these plays;
but Yeats’s chagrin at the overshadowing of his
poetic drama by the realistic folk-dramas of Synge and Lady Gregory was
uncalled for, for the latter had found the real poetry of Ireland in native
dialects, not in made-up verse. And their comically realistic portrayal of
contemporary life by no means stinted the visionary and the ideal. Further,
through the use of symbol, extravagant incident, and a richly evocative,
lyrical prose, they transcended standard realism to the extent that there is
critical justification, as there was with Shaw, for not considering their plays
realistic at all, in the usual sense of that word. As for the lack of patriotism,
the state of present-day
Although “The Green Crow” and “The Flying
Wasp” were Sean O’Casey’s own nicknames for himself
(also titles of his essay collections), acknowledgment of the raucous and stinging
voice of contention he often sounded in his constant quarrel with certain Irish
and other benighteds, perhaps it’s time to put more
emphasis on “the ginger man” in him, for, in a moribund society, he was one of
the great lyrical celebrators of the Life Force, particularly interested in the
sexual liberation of the young as a means of breaking down the walls of class
and economic distinction and of routing the deadening effect of respectability
with an affirmation of instinctual life. As he said, “Praise God for th’ urge of jubilation in the heart of the young.”50 No doubt his own very hard life as a
youth had much to do with that emphasis.
Born John Casey in 188o, he was that most
anomalous of Irishmen, a poor Protestant, which he pretty much remained to his
dying day (in 1964). The
youngest of thirteen children, eight of whom died in infancy, John found a hard
life get harder when his father, Michael Casey, died in 1886, leaving his
mother, Susan, to scrape out a living in Dublin’s slums. Tenement dwellers they
may have been, sometimes with empty bellies for days at a time, but they were
not uncultured, and school and private reading were encouraged among the
children, though in John’s case chronic trachoma, which eventually led to
blindness, made attendance at school and reading difficult. Despite about only
three years of formal schooling, John persisted with secondhand books and
taught himself. Though steeped in the Bible, Shakespeare, and other classics,
and owing much to them in his own stylistics, he always pointed to his
encounter with Shaw’s works as the great awakener, and later the Shaws and the O’Caseys would
become great friends, O’Casey once referring to himself as playing “Peter” to
Shaw’s “Christ” in their crusade against the evils of the day.51
Working full-time from the age of fourteen,
for nine years (1903-1911) as common laborer for the Great Northern Railway of
Ireland, he nevertheless found time to teach Sunday school (1900-1903) and to become very active in the
Gaelic League (beginning in 1906), learning
Gaelic well enough to teach it, “gaelicizing” his name to Sean O’Cathasaigh
(which he changed to Sean O’Casey in 1923). In fits of nationalism, he joined the Irish Republican
Brotherhood in 1908 and served
as secretary of the Irish Citizen Army in 1914, eventually writing its history (published 1919). But at the same time (beginning in
1911) he was pulled in a
different direction by his membership in Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport and
General Worker’s Union, a membership that got him fired from the railway, after
which he wrote articles for Larkin’s Irish
Worker, served as secretary of the Women and Children’s
Relief Fund during the general strike and lockout of 1913, and, during Larkin’s later imprisonment
in 1921, was secretary of the Release Jim Larkin Committee. His understanding
of
His writings at first were mostly stories,
poems, and journalistic pieces. His first two plays, The Harvest Festival and The Frost in the Flower, were rejected by the Abbey in
1920, as were other one-acters he wrote soon after.
In 1923 he was launched as a
playwright at the age of forty-two by Abbey productions of The Shadow of a Gunman and the
one-act Cathleen Listens
In. The year 1924 saw
Abbey productions of Juno and the Paycock and the one-act Nannie’s Night Out, and 1926 was the year of The Plough and the Stars, with
its replay of the riots over Synge’s Playboy
and Yeats’s great fight with the Abbey
audience—“You have disgraced yourselves again.” It was one of Yeats’s and the Abbey’s finest hours. O’Casey was just what the Abbey needed to
revive itself, and thus no one could have predicted what happened next.
In
1928, Yeats, exceedingly
indulgent of experimentation with abstraction in his own plays and secretly
didactic, strangely could not tolerate O’Casey’s
experiment with expressionism and a more open didacticism, persuading Lady
Gregory, to her everlasting regret, to reject the anti-war play The Silver Tassie.
O’Casey, who had temporarily moved
to London to oversee productions of his plays and who had married the actress
Eileen Carey in 1927 with high hopes for an Abbey-based career, was so stung by
Yeats’s condescending letter of rejection, followed
by a bitter dispute over performing rights for other plays, that he boycotted
the Abbey for many years, residing in England for the rest of his life, a
voluntary exile “from every creed, from every party, and from every literary
clique” in Ireland.52
A standard but partly erroneous view of the
effect of this exile was Gabriel Fallon’s (one-time Abbey actor, later drama
critic, thought by O’Casey to be a traitor): “It was indeed a severe blow and
in some respects a mortal one, for it stabilised his
exile, deprived him of the theatre workshop he had in the Abbey, and ultimately
left him to experiment in vacuo with an expressionistic technique of which
he was never the complete master. To a great extent it killed that inner
confidence in himself as a dramatist which the success
of Juno and The Plough had helped to build.”53 But O’Casey always resented
this view that his early “slum realism” plays—The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno, and The Plough—represented the acme of his achievement and that as
his style became expressionistic, sometimes openly didactic, and at first less
Irish in theme and character, he failed as a playwright, and he was largely
unforgiving of anyone who took that view. Former friends became enemies
overnight for just that reason. When Fallon chided him on his decline and urged
him to “return to first principles,” O’Casey pointed out that some of his first
plays had been nonrealistic and thus he was returning to first principles when he wrote nonrealistically.
Within
the Gates (1934) was his
first completely expressionistic play, and most of his
plays from then on were expressionistic or at least had some expressionistic
element in them. While there is some truth to the idea that his best plays are
those that stick predominantly to Irish themes and characters (he returned to
these in his last phase after attempting more universal themes and characters
in his middle phase), O’Casey should not be faulted for attempting to rise
above Irish provincialism and relate to the larger world, nor are the plays
that attempt this failures. He was simply a man ahead of his time, writing Brechtian drama in a theater environment that was stuck on
realism and naturalism. The Abbey’s loss of O’Casey was a more serious blow to
the theater than his loss of it, for it afterward descended to a level of
quotidian realism that it seldom rose above, and maintained some semblance of
its former glory mostly through revivals.
O’Casey’s career in England was one of ups and downs, and he often had bad luck with the timing of
productions. The same was true of American productions. In 1935 a banning in
O’Casey’s persistent theme is the Dionysian
affirmation of the Life Force—particularly in its female manifestation—in its
eternal conflict with the Death Force. The saintly, sacrificing nature of his
mother in the care of her children, such as her patient morning ritual of
bathing her son’s afflicted eyes, probably had much to do with O’Casey’s emphasis in his early plays on the redeeming
female spirit, particularly in its maternal aspect. Amidst the almost
unrelieved folly of his Irish males, O’Casey’s female
characters seem to be the principal hope for the survival of the Life Force.
The males contribute a song and a dance sometimes, and an unbridled imagination
set loose upon the language to glorious ends, things O’Casey highly valued as
life-enhancing, but it is generally the women who take the most practical and
courageous steps to see that Life prevails.
The three major Abbey plays that
established O’Casey’s reputation—Gunman, Juno, and The Plough—form a trilogy
that tell the story of Ireland’s “troubles” in the years of World War I and
after, though they were not written in the order of history’s chronology. The Plough and the Stars, written
last in 1926, tells of the
Easter Rebellion of 1916 from
the point of view of a handful of slum dwellers, who
exist mostly off to the side of that great, foolish insurrection. Parliamentary
bills for Irish Home Rule having been tabled by World War I, certain of the
more frustrated and impatient Irish, thinking the English would be too occupied
in the European battle, decided to force the issue with an armed uprising in
Dublin. The English squelched them in short order, executing most of the
leaders afterward. Yeats thought “a terrible beauty was born” of this, but O’Casey’s picture of confusion, madness, death, and disease
fails to show this. The Shadow of a
Gunman, written first in 1922-23 but set in 1920,
shows the effect on a small lodging house of the Black and Tan “terror”
of the years following the Rebellion when English repression and Irish rebel
violence was at its most extreme. Juno
and the Paycock, written second in 1924,
again focuses on a particular family and their neighbors in a Dublin
tenement, this time during the period of the civil war (1922), brought on
by the English granting of Free State status to Ireland, which the majority of
Irish accepted but a violent minority did not, as it still required
an oath of allegiance to the English monarch by members of the Irish Parliament
and partition of Ireland into North and South. The Free Staters
defeated the republican “diehards,” but ultimately republican political
pressure brought a greater degree of independence to
In these three plays, O’Casey added urban
notes to the “soul music” of Synge’s and Gregory’s folk dialects, achieving a
language no less fundamentally poetic and theatrical, making realism and naturalism therefore no less
inadequate as terms to describe their styles. It is no accident that the
central character of his first major play, The Shadow of a Gunman (originally On the Run), is a poet, Donal
Davoreen, for through him O’Casey was struggling to
understand his role in the violently political milieu of the Black and Tan
repression of 1920. Suspected of being a rebel gunman “on
the run,” Donal does not try hard enough to dispel
this false notion, especially when pretty young Minnie Powell takes a fancy to
him on those grounds. His development is similar to Christy Mahon’s in Synge’s Playboy, except that his
acceding to the inflation of heroic mythmaking only ends in his ultimate
deflation when reality puts him to the test. When a friend of his roommate’s
actually leaves some rebel bombs in his room, unbeknownst to him, and a Black
and Tan search frightens him to his senses, he allows brave, love-smitten
Minnie to hide the bombs. As she is arrested and accidentally killed by a rebel
ambush of the English soldiers, Donal ends by
lamenting his fate as “poet and poltroon.”
O’Casey seems to have drawn the basic
situation from a stay at a lodging where he too was mistaken for a gunman “on
the run,” but one suspects that he means here to distinguish between the kind
of poet he was and the kind Yeats was, for the play contains a mostly hidden
pattern of allusion in which Donal and Minnie are
presented as a slum-parody version of Yeats and Maud Gonne. Minnie is like Maud
in hankering after a hero (significantly, after rejecting Yeats as a man of
action, Maud eventually married a gunman, McBride, who died in the Easter
Rebellion). Minnie is referred to as “a Helen of Troy,” Yeats’s
familiar appellation for Maud, and Donal speaks of
her as “a pioneer in action” as he is “a pioneer in thought,” the two powers
that shall “mould life nearer to the heart’s desire,” in a quote from Shelley
that inspired Yeats’s play The Land of Heart’s Desire. Donal, like
Yeats, is inspired by the lady’s heroic vision of him, but his creed of
aesthetic escapism and his elitist contempt for the people make his heroism
detached from social reality. When he discovers he’s caught in a situation that
would require him to act like a real hero, he says, “The sooner I’m on the run out of this house the
better” (my italics).55
The running he contemplates is to avoid
engagement in a cause, not to fight for it, even verbally. O’Casey
as a poet who was engagé,
is pillorying the sort of poet who, on the grounds of being above it all in a
spiritual quest for Beauty, refused to be committed. Remember that the great Yeats had already
turned down several of O’Casey’s plays on the artistic
grounds that they were too “committed.” At the same time O’Casey is
acknowledging a kinship with Yeats in the necessarily problematic relationship
of any poet to a violent,
nationalistic cause.
All three plays of the
O’Casey managed a much stronger tragic
feeling in Juno and the Paycock, his “slice of life” in the time
of the “troubles,” when Irish fought Irish in civil war. The stronger tragic
feeling comes from a better focus—the most defeated figure is also the central
figure and the most vital character, Captain Boyle, who imagines he was once a
seafaring captain. Boyle is the braggart soldier type from ancient comedy, a
peacock of a man who struts about with a great show of boldness, wisdom, and
practical know-how, but whose gaudy feathers fold at the slightest challenge.
Driving his wife, Juno, to distraction with his feckless, indolent ways, he is
abetted by his buddy, Joxer Daley, in a careful
avoidance of gainful employment and furtive pursuit of spendthrift pleasure in
the local pub. The classical Juno, Roman goddess of domesticity, was associated
with peacocks, patron birds who protect her; further,
in Christian symbolism peacocks are signs of resurrection. But Boyle is unaware
of any heroic dimension about his wife, nicknaming her “Juno” for trivial
reasons, and serving her badly, not as her protector, but as a parasite, for it
is her determination and hard work that has largely kept her family together in
their marginal existence. And he brings to her, not resurrection, but
desolation and defeat. He is a “paycock” only in the
modern sense of one who is falsely proud.56 “Mother Ireland” is on her own here.
O’Casey begins by showing how circumstances
have shaped the Boyle family and have frustrated their desire to rise above
their tenement subsistence. Their son, Johnny, crippled by wounds incurred
during the Easter Rebellion, is lost in the contemplation of the disaster that
has rendered his young life useless. Defensive and strangely guilty at the news
that the son of another lodger, Mrs. Tancred, was murdered in an ambush, Johnny
persists in an increasingly frantic denial of complicity. Juno’s fruitless
attempts to get her artfully dodging husband into a job, and the comic doings
of the captain and Joxer as they breakfast on
sausages and blarney and charmingly plan the day’s evasions of responsibility,
further reveal a hopeless situation. The only note of hope is in the suggestion
of a new romance in the life of their pretty daughter, Mary, but this note is
qualified by her foolish rejection of the up-and-coming labor leader, Jerry
Devine, and the fact that she too is out of work, voluntarily on strike but
nevertheless a victim of labor union principles, even as her brother is a
victim of nationalist principles.
O’Casey then introduces into this generally
bleak and unpromising situation a favorite device of nineteenth-century melodramatists for miraculously reversing such a fallen
state, a sudden and unexpected inheritance, but only to show that it doesn’t
work that way in real life. Mary’s new beau, the seemingly sophisticated
Charlie Bentham, schoolteacher and legal assistant, brings wondrous news of
the bequeathing of a saving wealth to the Boyles from a forgotten relative.
Impregnated with the idea that they are soon to be rich, the Boyles swell with
importance and incur debts as they borrow against the future to make the
present more enjoyable, even Juno getting caught up in the spending fever. But just as the smooth-talking Bentham has gotten Mary pregnant
only to leave her with a bastard, so he has, by his legal inexperience, left
them with a bastard of a will, legally belonging to nobody. As their
fortune collapses and their newly purchased goods are repossessed, news comes
that Johnny has been killed by “Diehards” who suspected him, for reasons of
personal jealousy, of having betrayed his friend Tancred. Her family ambitions
totally defeated, Juno takes Mary off with her to raise the forthcoming child
on their own, leaving the drunken Captain and Joxer
to slump to the floor of an empty apartment in the midst of sentimental
reminiscence and the famous declaration that “the whole world’s in a terrible
state o’chassis”(73). But, to a considerable degree,
O’Casey shows the Irish chaos to be self-generated; they bring their fate on
themselves.
Yet the charge that O’Casey was belittling
the Irish is not quite true, as his next play, The Plough and the Stars, more clearly shows. Here as
in the other plays, the Irish are indeed ridiculed for being cowardly,
self-indulgent, lazy, hypocritical, envious, braggardly,
quarrelsome, drunken, sentimental, traitorous, foolishly idealistic,
blarney-ridden, priest-ridden, and so on, a considerable indictment; but the
indictment is more of the human condition than of the Irish, and in fact a
certain Irishness in their venality partly redeems
them.57 At least
they’re theatrical, humorous, and lively about it, even poetic. More important,
O’Casey seems to put the final emphasis, not on the venality, but on the
indomitable spirit of the Irish and on the inimitable style with which they
struggle against or suffer indignity. That indomitable spirit, ironically, is
less in their fondness for heroic posturing than in their anti-heroic venality.
Their true heroism is in their élan,
the personal style in which they endure, and their longing for greater and more
abundant life, however foolishly they distort a noble aspiration with ignoble
realizations. O’Casey’s satiric comment is not so
much on their willingness to contradict their ideals with unseemly behavior—for
when people behave instinctively, as the Life Force impels, they seldom can
live up to their ideals—as on the life-denying ideals themselves. Their
downfall is not to be interpreted as the inevitable result of man’s sinful
nature (one way of accounting for not living up to ideals) but as the result of
a vast craving for more abundant life and of realizing that healthy impulse in
ways that warp, cheat, or pollute the desire.
Tragedy traditionally reaffirms the primacy
of the unwritten laws of the gods, as Sophocles puts it, and these O’Casey
plays also suggest the presence of certain principles of life that seem to
override everything else. Life commands the individual to self-fulfillment, as
a means not only for the full development of the self but for the evolution of
the species; but the world frustrates this desire with its sundry limitations,
and so a tragic confrontation ensues between life as it should be and life as it
comes. In juxtaposing these things and drawing out their poignant ironies,
O’Casey managed a considerable variety of plot and characterization.
The Plough
and the Stars is like Juno and unlike Gunman in not having a character
capable of “tragic recognition,” yet it manages the strongest tragic feeling of
all his plays, perhaps because the accumulation of ironies is so devastating.
The play opens a few months before the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and closes in the midst of that
disaster. Again we focus on a particular family, Nora Clitheroe
and her wouldbe hero of a husband, Jack; but Nora’s
changing the lock on her door is unable to keep out the contentious, brawling
neighbors of this typically overcrowded tenement. The central struggle is
Nora’s: to uphold an ideal of domestic respectability whereby she can rise
above her slum environment. She will sacrifice everything to this ideal,
including her husband’s self-esteem. But when Jack discovers that she has
hidden a letter proclaiming him a commandant of a Citizen Army regiment, and
that his jealousy over the promotion of a rival was unnecessary, he angrily
denounces her domestic ideal and, in a reversal of A Doll House, walks out on his “little red-lipped
Nora,” who secretly thought she had saved her husband’s life. After Jack leaves
to join the rebel army, a tubercular child named Mollser
(belonging to a Mrs. Gogan) ironically expresses her
envy of Nora, but her voice is drowned out by the music of a brass band playing
“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” for a regiment of
Irish Volunteers marching off to fight in the trenches of World War I alongside
the English, hailed as heroes by the Protestant tenant, Bessie Burgess, as she
denounces the rebels. Of such close ironic counterpointing
is this play composed throughout.
Act 2 an hour later—the hour of the great,
enflaming speech based on speeches of Padraic Pearse, president of the provisional Irish government when
it proclaimed
In act 3, as the Easter Rebellion breaks
out and Nora returns from a fruitless attempt to find her husband, it gradually
dawns on the slum dwellers that in all the confusion this would be a perfect
opportunity for looting, Mrs. Gogan and Bessie
Burgess, for example, fighting over a baby carriage that would nicely serve for
hauling, and the Falstaffian Fluther
Good setting off to loot a pub. Naturally this requires sections of the army to
patrol the streets and shoot at the looters—”slum lice”—rather than fight the
English. Suddenly, in the midst of comic
cavortings, Jack returns to Nora, expressing a wish
that he had never left her, but he is shamed by his companions into leaving her
again to resume the fight. The rough leaving brings on labor pains in Nora,
whereupon Bessie Burgess, jealous of Nora or not, Protestant or not, goes for a
doctor, the men around being too drunk from fear.
Act 4 takes place in Bessie’s small attic
room, with a coffin containing the bodies of both Nora’s aborted baby and the
deceased Mollser placed near a window. When news
comes that Clitheroe has been killed, Nora, already
on the brink, topples into insanity, calling for the dead as though they were
alive. With trigger-happy English forces patrolling the streets searching for
snipers, Bessie is shot trying to push the raving Nora away from the window.
Placing a sheet over Bessie, Mrs. Gogan leads the
crazed Nora out, leaving behind apologetic English soldiers who help themselves
to tea and sing “Keep the Home Fires Burning” as a glare in the sky signals the
general attack on the post office where the principal rebels are making their
final stand.
Naturalism is supposed to show humanity at
the mercy of heredity and environment, and to a considerable extent O’Casey’s slum trilogy does reveal the shaping influence of
such factors, but the plays also show the slum dwellers fighting back and
asserting their individualities. The looting in The Plough, for example, would, in conventional
naturalism, be indicative of the power of vengeful greed operating in
stimulus-and-response fashion on society’s declassé, but O’Casey’s more optimistic, semi-comic tone transmutes this
looting into a positive sign of health. Their not looting would be a sign that naturalistic forces had
indeed beaten them into submission. Further, the amount of extravagant
incident, language, and character tells against the labeling of these plays as
conventionally naturalistic. The stage directions, with their frequent
reference to the shaping of character by environment, are often explicitly
naturalistic, but almost every other element of dramaturgy—the language, the
music, the symbolism, the character typing, the often theatrical stage imagery,
the deliberate use of coincidence—points to a playwright who will find a move
to even more theatrical modes of expression congenial.
In two giant steps, from The Silver Tassie to
Within the Gates, O’Casey
traveled the full distance from an apparent realism or naturalism to a very
assertive and theatrical nonrealism. The Silver Tassie
retains the conventions of individualized characters and realistic episodes
for most of the play but juxtaposes these with an expressionistic, nightmarish
account of war at the front. Focused on Harry Heegan,
football hero, the play follows him from the moment of his crowning success
when he wins the cup—the Silver Tassie—for his club
to his return from World War I maimed and bitter. Losing his girl to his best
friend and permanently confined to a wheelchair, Harry is unable to accept his
condition. At a club dance, Harry in a rage destroys the tassie,
symbol of his health and greatness. The play’s most effective scene in
fulfilling its anti-war purpose occurs in act 2—amidst an expressionistically
staged ruin of a monastery converted into a Red Cross station, the wounded are
watched over by the allegorical Croucher wearing a
death’s head, and soldiers chanting plainsong convey some of the horror of the
war.
The abstraction of that second act took
over the whole of Within the Gates.
The characters are entirely symbolic figures—Dreamer (poet), an Atheist, a
Bishop, a Salvation Army Officer—representing different views of life, and
their quarrel is played out, during the Depression, “within the gates” of Hyde
Park in four scenes that cover the full cycle of the seasons and the times of
day (morning-noon-evening-night). Their quarrel is a fight for the soul of a
young whore, Jannice (played in
This abstract drama, harkening back to the
morality play, obviously lends itself to propaganda, and in The Star Turns Red (1938-39)
O’Casey attempted to apply the morality play to the conflict between communism
and fascism in a manner that propagandizes the relative virtue of the former.
Some critics have found this to be the best of propaganda plays, artistically
speaking, but of course the standard is not very high, as O’Casey admitted. Its
excuse, of course, is the time in which it was written, when the failure of
Western democracies to stop the rise of fascism led the desperate to place
their hopes in communism. But as for O’Casey’s
supposed dedication to the cause, one should note that he was never a member of
the Communist party and never idealized the proletariat, nor can one imagine
someone of his independent temperament fitting in very well with a Stalinist
society. His communism was the sign of an attitude rather than a doctrinal
position. As Shaw explained it to O’Casey’s wife: “A
Communist is born a Communist. . . . It’s in your everyday life. It’s in your
attitude to people. It’s in your obvious desire for everybody to have a fair
share, especially in education.”58
At about the same time, O’Casey
was finding his way back to Irish subjects, most of his characters from 1940 on
being Irish, and he tempered the abstraction of his drama with a renewed
interest in indiidual character. Purple Dust (1939-40), somewhat on
the order of Shaw’s John Bull’s
Other Island, juxtaposes English and Irish characters in an Irish
setting, making many comic points about both nations. Red Roses for Me (1940-42),
a blend of realism and symbolism, epic and lyrical rather than
documentary, celebrates the Irish labor movement in a
Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy (1947) was O’Casey’s
favorite play, which he described as “a secular hymn to the joy of life.”59 In the village of Nyadnanave
(Gaelic for “Nest of Saints”), a priest named Father Domineer and a rich old
peat-bog owner, Michael Mathraun, impose the
repressive, life-denying forces of a puritanical Catholic Church and a
tightfisted, bourgeois capitalism. Opposed to these killjoys is the Cock, a
Dionysian spirit, thought by the pious to be a demon from hell because his
magic causes strange supernatural events, particularly since the day the
beautiful Loreleen, Mathraun’s
daughter by his young first wife, returned from London with her “pagan” ways
and began disturbing the chaste thoughts of local maledom.
The Cock’s disciples in a Dionysian revolt, besides Loreleen,
are Mathraun’s young second wife, Lorna, and her
maid, Marion, who are joined by Robin Adair, a messenger in love with Marion,
and Sailor Mahon, who is engaged in a labor dispute with old Mathraun and is smitten by Loreleen.
Representing the powers of joy, love, and freedom, they are, mainly through
Father Domineer’s efforts, at first isolated from the
community and then exiled. The Cock wreaks havoc in retaliation, but his
disciples, and thus his spirit, are exiled, and the point is made that in
leaving the village they “go not towards an evil, but leave an evil behind.”60 The play is typical of O’Casey’s last phase, in which he switches from the earlier
mother figure to youth in general as the great hope for regeneration.
In
his final two full-length plays, The
Bishop’s Bonfire (1954.) and The Drums of Father Ned (1957), O’Casey continues
his attack on the bigotry, superstition, and fear of life that he thought
passed for religion among many Irish. As Robin Adair sums up Michael Mathraun’s religion to him in Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy, “Your fathers’ faith is fear, and now
fear is your only fun”(464). In The
Bishop’s Bonfire the attack is aimed at an authoritarian church and
state who force the young into loveless marriage and who consume opposition in
the burning of books and art. But it’s
noteworthy that encouraging the young in their revolt against such
arbitrariness is Father Boheroe, who believes that
“merriment may be a way of worship.” As usual in O’Casey, the rebels are
defeated, but the defeat makes plainer
As with Shaw, O’Casey was interested, not
in destroying religion, as he was charged, but in “redistilling the eternal
spirit of religion,”61
believing that
Link to Title Page
& Table of Contents
Link to Chapter 5--"1930-1950:
Waiting for Beckett"