SOURCE: Gregory, Lady Augusta. “The Fight Over The Playboy.” In Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography, pp. 109-18. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913.

In the following chapter from her autobiography, Lady Gregory reflects on the controversy that resulted from the Abbey Theatre's staging of John Millington Synge's peasant play The Playboy of the Western World.

When Synge's Shadow of the Glen was first played in the Molesworth Hall in 1903, some attacks were made on it by the Sinn Fein weekly newspaper. In the play the old husband pretends to be dead, the young wife listens to the offers of a young farmer, who asks her to marry him in the chapel of Rathvanna when “Himself will be quiet a while in the Seven Churches.” The old man jumps up, drives her out of the house, refusing to make peace, and she goes away with a tramp...