Irish Plays and Playwrights

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Plays and Playwrights, by Cornelius Weygandt

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Title: Irish Plays and Playwrights
Author: Cornelius Weygandt
Release Date: August 11, 2006 [EBook #19028]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS
BY
CORNELIUS WEYGANDT
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY CORNELIUS WEYGANDT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published February 1913
[Illustration]

PREFACE
There are so many who have helped me with this book that I cannot begin to thank them one by one. If I name any, however, there are four I would name together. There is my old friend, long since dead, Lawrence Kelly, of County Wexford, who first told me Irish folk-stories, adding to the wonderment of my boyhood with his tales of Finn McCool, Dean Swift, and "The Red-haired Man." There is Dr. Robert Ellis Thompson, of Philadelphia, who quickened, by his enthusiasm, over "twenty golden years ago," my interest in all things Irish. There is Dr. Clarence Griffin Child, my colleague, who recognized the power of these men I write of in "Irish Plays and Playwrights" when there were fewer to recognize their power than there are to-day. There is Mr. John Quinn, of New York, without whose aid ten years ago the current Irish dramatic movement would not have progressed as it has. He has lent for reproduction here the sketches by Mr. J.B. Yeats of Synge, Mr. George Moore, and Mr. Padraic Colum. All but all of the writers I mention particularly in these chapters have put me under obligation by cheerful response to many letters full of questions as to their work. Mr. James H. Cousins and Mr. S. Lennox Robinson have taken especial trouble in my behalf, and Lady Gregory, Mr. W.B. Yeats, and Mr. George W. Russell have put themselves out in many ways that I might learn of Irish Letters.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, December 28, 1912.

CONTENTS
I. THE CELTIC RENAISSANCE 1
II. THE PLAYERS AND THEIR PLAYS, THEIR AUDIENCE AND THEIR ART 13
III. MR. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 37
IV. MR. EDWARD MARTYN AND MR. GEORGE MOORE 72
V. MR. GEORGE W. RUSSELL ("A.E.") 114
VI. LADY GREGORY 138
VII. JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE 160
VIII. THE YOUNGER DRAMATISTS--MR. PADRAIC COLUM; MR. WILLIAM BOYLE; MR. T.C. MURRAY; MR. S. LENNOX ROBINSON; MR. RUTHERFORD MAYNE; "NORREYS CONNELL"; MR. ST. JOHN G. ERVINE; MR. JOSEPH CAMPBELL 198
IX. WILLIAM SHARP ("FIONA MACLEOD") 251
APPENDIX 297 PLAYS PRODUCED, IN DUBLIN, BY THE ABBEY THEATRE COMPANY
INDEX 305

ILLUSTRATIONS
W.B. YEATS Frontispiece From a photograph by Alice Boughton.
DOUGLAS HYDE 10 From a photograph by Alice Boughton.
SARA ALLGOOD 24 From a photograph by Alice Boughton.
SCENE FROM "CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN" 50
GEORGE MOORE 72 Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq.
GEORGE W. RUSSELL 114
LADY GREGORY 138
JOHN MILLINGTON SYNGE 160 Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq.
PADRAIC COLUM 198 Reproduced by courtesy of John Quinn, Esq.
T.C. MURRAY 216
LENNOX ROBINSON 222 From a photograph by Alice Boughton.
WILLIAM SHARP 250

IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS
CHAPTER I
THE CELTIC RENAISSANCE
To the general reader the Celtic Renaissance was a surprise, and even to Irish writers deeply interested in their country the phenomenon or movement, call it which you will, was not appreciated as of much significance at its beginning. Writing in 1892, Miss Jane Barlow was not hopeful for the immediate future of English literature in Ireland;--it seemed to her "difficult to point out any quarter of the horizon as a probable source of rising light." Yet Mr. Yeats had published his "Wanderings of Oisin" three years before; Mr. Russell had already gathered about him a group of eager young writers; and Dr. Hyde was organizing the Gaelic League, to give back to Ireland her language and civilization, and translating from the Gaelic "The Love Songs of Connacht" (1894) into an English of so new and masterful a rhythm, that it was to dominate the style of many of the writers of the movement, as the burden of the verse was to confirm them in the feelings and attitudes of mind, centuries old and of to-day, that are basic to the Irish Gael. Even in 1894, when Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson wrote the article that for the first time brought before America so many of the younger English poets, all that she said of the Renaissance was, "A very large proportion of the Bodley Head poets are Celts,--Irish, Welsh, Cornish." She had scarcely so spoken when there appeared the little volume, "The Revival of Irish Literature," whose chapters, reprinted addresses delivered before she had spoken by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and Dr. George