by Colm Toibin
Lady Gregory’s mixture of high ideals and natural haughtiness gave her an inflexibility and sturdy determination that were invaluable when dealing with those who opposed her. Her gifts to govern men, her passion and precision, as Yeats put it, came into their own in the early years of the twentieth century when she became involved with the Abbey Theatre. She won her battles, partly because she kept her eye fiercely on her primary aim: to create a theatre that would add dignity to Ireland.
Her first battle was with Miss Horniman, the tea-heiress from Manchester who bankrolled the theatre in its early days and made great demands on the management and fellow directors while also making a pitch for the affections of W.B. Yeats. In many letters to Yeats, Lady Gregory deplored Miss Horniman’s “vulgar arrogance and bullying” and suggested that she “should be locked up”. She also called her “cracked”, “a blood sucker”, “a crocodile”, “the Saxon shilling”, “wicked”, “a mad woman”, “insane” and “a raving lunatic”. If this was not enough to dislodge her, Lady Gregory pulled rank. “I have never treated her as an equal”, she wrote to Yeats, “without regretting it.” And later: “I think it is a mistake treating tradespeople as if they had one’s own table of values.”
Miss Horniman took particular exception to the Abbey’s remaining open on the death of Edward V11 in 1910. Lady Gregory was at Coole when she received the news of the king’s death from Lennox Robinson. Her telegram – “should close through courtesy” – did not arrive in time for the matinee, and Robinson, whose decision-making processes were a constant scourge to Lady Gregory, decided that since the matinee had taken place, the evening performance should go on as well. Miss Horniman was opposed to the use of the theatre for political purposes and saw the non-closure as a political act; she sent many angry messages and threatened as usual to withdraw her subsidy. When it was suggested that Lady Gregory might have sent her telegram as a way of placating Miss Horniman, Lady Gregory grew very dignified and grand. She was no longer “the woman of the house that has to be minding the place, and listening to complaints and dividing her share of food”. “My impulse was to close,” she wrote, “but I thought I might be prejudiced by the fact of the King having been a personal friend of my husband, who had been his host and his guest and had received presents from him and being made by him a member of the Marlborough Club. But certainly in the few minutes I took to decide and to write my answer ‘should close through courtesy’ the idea of Miss Horniman or any letter of hers did not come into my mind at all.”
This hauteur and invective were accompanied over several years by Lady Gregory’s slow and deliberate preparations to have Miss Horniman removed. While Miss Horniman ranted and raved, Lady Gregory never lost her nerve. By early 1911, she had succeeded.
The actors were easier. Lady Gregory was tireless in her efforts to keep them in their place. She had a barm brack made for them regularly in Gort. Maire Ní Shiubhlaigh, or Miss Walker as Lady Gregory called her, wrote that “it was a huge cart-wheel of a fruit cake, filled with the richest ingredients, made specially by her own bakers at Gort for the casts of any of her new plays. It was a huge affair of several pounds weight and usually took two to carry in. It must have been two feet in circumference, and fully eight inches in depth.” Her brack became part of the folklore of the Abbey Theatre. Willie Fay, one of her leading actors, called it “the father and mother of a brack … A single slice of one of those Gort barm bracks was as good as a meal.” Brinsley MacNamara, however, took a dim view of the brack: “It came in time to be regarded in an unkindly and suspicious way as something that had a sort of feudal touch about it, the kind of thing that grand ladies sometimes supplied for high jinks in the servants’ hall. So great lumps of it would remain untaken and be relegated to the scene dock for consumption by the stage hands.”
Many of Lady Gregory’s letters to Yeats and journal entries are made up of accounts of the firm grip she was keeping on the actors, her war against the antics of Miss Allgood or the petulance of Miss Walker, the absence or indeed the presence of Miss Magee, the demands of the Fay brothers or Vaughan, and other pieces of insubordination or demands for more money by Miss Drago, Miss O’Dougherty and Miss Malony. “I have very little hope of keeping Fay,” she wrote to Yeats in 1907, “and would not keep him but on the understanding that we are employers and he employed … I would certainly dismiss Vaughan but we must think what excuse is best – it might be best to say we are offended by his acting.” She cast a cold eye on all newcomers. In February 1916 she wrote to Yeats that a new actress, “Mrs Cruise O’Brien, was as bad as could be, with no redeeming point, amateurish, clumsy and revolting in appearance”.
What the actors and actresses throught of Lady Gregory in turn may be gleaned from the memoirs of Maire Ní Shiubhlaigh. Lady Gregory, she wrote, would come to Dublin when a new play was to be read by the Abbey players. She would take rooms in a hotel, “entertaining lavishly during her stay”. Lady Gregory “inisted on reading over selected pieces to us in her hotel drawing room”, Maire Ní Shiubhlaigh remembered. “Her odd lisping voice had a peculiar effect on speeches, especially those of the poetic sort, and, later, the lilting lines of J.M. Synge, which suffered much through her pronunciation. I think she rather fancied herself as an actress … But she was a pleasant if at times rather condescending person, who treated us all as children in need of special advice.”
Lady Gregory’s condescending manner, and her readiness to do battle, and her tough attitude towards opposition, made all the difference when the artistic integrity of the Abbey Theatre was under attack. The importance of Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s collaboration at the Abbey was not so much that words of theirs sent out certain men the English shot, but that during the time when they ran the theatre a number of enduring masterpieces were produced, notably the plays of Synge and O’Casey, and also George Bernard Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet.
Both Yeats and Lady Gregory maintained their relationship to a peasant culture they had dreamed into being and at the same time made no effort to repudiate their own Anglo-Irish heritage. This gave them an enormous advantage in both Ireland and London: they were members of a ruling class who lost none of their edge or high manners or old friends while espousing a new politics and a new art in Ireland. They were independent and they did what they liked, subject to no peer-group or class pressure. It was the mixture of ambiguity and arrogance in their position which made them ready for the exemplary battles they were now to fight for artistic freedom in Ireland, the right to stage the plays of Synge, Shaw and O’Casey. They, and no one else, had the strength of will and the class confidence and the belief in their cause to do battle with the Playboy rioters, the Catholic Church, the Lord Lieutenant and, when the time came, the new Irish state.
Lady Gregory first saw John Millington Synge in 1898. “I first saw him”, she later wrote, “in the North Island of Aran. I was staying there, gathering folklore talking to the people, and felt a real pang of indignation when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people. I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and seaweed gatherers. I did not speak to the stranger nor was he inclined to speak to me. He also looked on me as an intruder.” Lady Gregory was forty-six; Synge was twenty-seven. He was a middle-class Protestant and, in Roy Foster’s phrase, “an apprentice bohemian”. He, like Lady Gregory, had proselytizing Protestantism in his background, his uncle having been the first Protestant missionary on the Aran Islands. Both he and Lady Gregory had mothers who were addicted to salvation. Yeats had already met him in Paris, and soon he was invited to Coole.
Synge was a great mystery: solitary, detached, over-educated, watchful. The exuberance and depth of feeling in his work were strangely absent from his personality. His sophistication, his irony and his wide reading responded warmly to the speech patterns, the way of life and the landscape he found in the west of Ireland. He had, Lady Gregory wrote, “done no good work until he came back to his own country. I
t was there that he found all he wanted, fable, emotion, style … bringing a cultured mind to a mass of primitive material, putting clearer and lasting form to the clumsily expressed emotion of a whole countryside.” Synge did not make his characters simple or charming or harmless, nor did he seek to stir up national feeling, unless uproarious laughter and wild paganism were forms of national feeling. Although he did not seem to have any special wish, in Lady Gregory’s phrase, to add dignity to Ireland, he wrote with feeling and awe and tenderness about the “folk-imagination of these fine people” in rural Ireland. In his Preface to The Playboy of the Western World he wrote that “anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings and ideas in the play are tame indeed, compared with the fancies one may hear in any hillside cabin in Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay”. Despite Synge’s invocation of the people, it was clear that the young men who had crowded in to see Cathleen Ni Houlihan, growing slowly more militant and confident in the years that followed its production, were going to be greatly offended by Synge’s plays.
The Shadow of the Glen, in which a woman runs away with a tramp, was first performed in 1903, and caused a deep rift between Yeats and Lady Gregory on one side and diehard nationalists – including Arthur Griffith, who founded Sinn Féin in that year – on the other. Griffith wrote that the play was “a story invented by the wits of decadent Greece and introduced, with amendments, into Latin literature by the most infamous of Roman writers, Petronius Arbiter, the pander of Nero … Mr Synge’s Nora Burke [who runs away with the tramp] is not an Irish Nora Burke, his play is not a work of genius – Irish or otherwise – it is a foul echo from degenerate Greece.” Maud Gonne also joined the attack: “Mr Yeats asks for freedom for the theatre, freedom even from patriotic captivity. I would ask for freedom for it from one thing more deadly than all else – freedom from the insidious and destructive tyranny of foreign influence.” Yeats’s response to the attacks included an article called “The National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance”. The second sort of ignorance was, he wrote, “the more ignorant sort of priest, who forgetful of the great traditions of the Church, would deny all ideas that might perplex a parish of farmers or artisans or half-educated shopkeepers”. This was published in the United Irishman. “For a liberal Protestant to refer to Catholicism this way in public”, Roy Foster wrote, “broke one of the taboos which sustained the uneasy collusions of Irish life; if to some his stance seemed self-regarding and amoral, to others his language smacked of the Protestant Ascendancy at its most contemptuous.”
Yeats’s third sort of ignorance was that of “the politicians, and not always of the most ignorant sort, who would reject every idea which is not of immediate service to his cause”. Towards the end of 1906, all three sorts of ignorance heard a rumour that there was a new Synge play in closed rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre which was likely to be even more offensive than The Shadow of the Glen.
What remains fascinating about the riots and controversies surrounding The Playboy of the Western World is how, once under pressure, the founders of the Abbey Theatre reverted to their Ascendancy and Protestant backgrounds. It was as though they forgot the transformation they had made in themselves, and behaved like a reformed alcoholic on a short spree. The old Fenian John O’Leary had warned Yeats that in Ireland you must have either the Fenians or the Church on your side. In writing The Countess Cathleen, his first play, he had alienated elements in the Church; in staging The Shadow of the Glen he had alienated elements in the Fenians. Now, in one fell swoop, he had alienated both.
After a week of riots in the theatre, there was, on Yeats’s suggestion, a public debate held in the Abbey on 4 February. Synge was too ill and uninterested to attend; Lady Gregory remained in the background. Yeats took the stage. Referring to a priest in Liverpool who had withdrawn a play because of the public’s objection, Yeats said of the Abbey directors: “we have not such pliant bones and did not learn in the houses that bred us a suppliant knee”. The audience would have understood this very clearly as a statement of arrogant Ascendancy values over suppliant Roman ones. When Yeats’s father in the same debate referred to Ireland as an island of saints and scholars and then, sneeringly, referred to “plaster saints” (“his beautiful mischievous head thrown back”, as Yeats described him many years later in “Beautiful Lofty Things”), the audience would also have understood his remark as an insult to Catholicism. (“Get the loy,” someone shouted to Yeats as his father spoke.) Lady Gregory’s nephew led a group of Trinity students to the theatre to defend the play and offer what was perhaps most notably absent in the debate – a rendering of “God Save the King”. And as the disturbances continued in the theatre, the Abbey directors, as property-owners, knew what to do: they called the police, who arrested rioters. The calling of the police did not win them many friends in nationalist Ireland.
Yeats, for the public debate, sat on the stage, wearing his bow tie, wallowing in all his beautiful ambiguity. He had called the police and he could also declare, in case anyone wished to question his patriotic credentials, that he spoke as the author of Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Joseph Holloway, who kept a diary of Dublin theatre life, wrote: “The odd thing is that Fay told me Lady Gregory wrote the whole of it except the part of ‘Cathleen’.”
Lady Gregory disliked The Playboy of the Western World; both she and Yeats had already removed words and phrases from the acting text. There would always be tension between Lady Gregory and Synge. Although he told her that her translation of Cuchulain was part of his daily bread, Synge felt, with some reason, that Lady Gregory promoted Yeats’s work for the theatre and, indeed, her own work over his, which he rightly felt was superior. She, in turn, liked him as little as his play. After his death, there is a crossed-out passage in the manuscript of her journals where she wrote: “One doesn’t want a series of panegyrics and we can’t say, don’t want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it … On tour he thought of his own play only, gave no help to ours and if he repeated compliments they were to his own.” Yeats in his journal wrote of Synge’s “complete absorption in his own dream. I never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer.”
After his death, Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “You did more than anyone for him, you gave him his means of expression. You have given me mine, but I should have found something else to do, though not anything coming near this, but I don’t think Synge would have done anything but drift but for you and the theatre.” And also: “I think you and I supplied him with vitality when he was with us as the wild people did in the Blaskets.”
Lady Gregory had remarked some years earlier that “we are all born bigots in Ireland”. Yeats in his journal for 1914 remarked: “A long continuity of culture like that at Coole could not have arisen and never has arisen, in a single Catholic family in Ireland since the Middle Ages.” Unlike the Yeatses, however, Lady Gregory confined her anti-Catholicism to a number of jokes and sharp, funny comments in her letters and journals. In February 1888, for example, she found dinner at the Denbighs’ “rather dull, all Catholics or perverts, except Lady Louisa Legge”. In Rome, she saw the Pope and thought the afternoon wasted, “unless it is a gain to feel more indignantly Protestant than ever”. In 1899 she wrote to Yeats about her Catholic neighbour Edward Martyn: “These papists haven’t the courage of a mouse.” In 1909, two years after The Playboy, she acidly placed the conflict between the Abbey directors and the Catholic nationalist mob in starker and, indeed, funnier terms: “It is the old battle,” she wrote to Yeats, “between those who use a toothbrush and those who don’t.”
As Catholic, nationalist and cavity-ridden Ireland felt more indignantly against The Playboy of the Western World, Lady Gregory needed all her courage. She and Yeats had to withdraw the play from performance in Birmingham during the English tour and then justify this to an irate Synge. And she had to go back to Coole,
where because of her involvement with Synge’s play she was forbidden by the local council to visit the workhouse or entertain the schoolchildren in Gort. When she asked Fr Fahy to intercede for her, he replied: “The request coming from you shall have all the more weight when forwarded to the board by yourself.” The people without toothbrushes were getting their revenge.
Between 16 February and 8 March 1909 George Bernard Shaw wrote his own version of The Playboy; it was a short play called The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama, and it was set in America, Blanco being an unrepentant horse thief with strong views on the Almighty. There were also several foul-mouthed women, and a lot of very funny, sometimes silly and often irreverent and blaspheming dialogue. Like The Playboy, it was deeply objectionable as much in its general tone as in its particulars. Shaw offered it to the actor Beerbohm Tree, who was to get a knighthood within three months. Tree’s concerns about the blasphemy and general immorality in the play were irrelevant because the Lord Chamberlain was prepared to ban the play. The Chamberlain’s remit did not extend to Dublin, however, and when Shaw handed the script to Lady Gregory, she took it to Yeats and they decided to produce it at the Abbey.
This would prove, if anyone needed proof (and indeed some did), that the Abbey Theatre would oppose censorship from every quarter. Yeats and Lady Gregory had stood up to the rabble; now they would, with the same hauteur and moral authority, stand up to Dublin Castle. In August 1909 Lady Gregory herself directed the play while Yeats stayed at Coole; it was the first play she had directed alone. Soon, the authorities wrote to her: “The play does not deal with an Irish subject, and it is not an Irish play in any other sense than that its author was born in Ireland. It is now proposed to produce this play in the Abbey Theatre which was founded for the express purpose of encouraging dramatic art in Ireland and of fostering a dramatic school growing out of the life of the country.” It was pointed out that the fact that the censor’s remit did not extend to Dublin was “an accidental freedom”. Lady Gregory was warned that the theatre could lose its patent.