SOURCE: Magalaner, Marvin and Richard M. Kain. “Exiles.” In Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation, pp. 130–145. New York: New York University Press, 1956.

In the following essay, Magalaner and Kain discuss reviews and varying opinions about Exiles.

Joyce's sole surviving drama, Exiles, was composed during the spring of 1914. Gorman considered it the author's “farewell to the past” in that it represents his final allegiance to traditional literary form.¹ As a young man in Dublin at the turn of the century, Joyce naturally evinced great interest in the drama. His “Day of the Rabblement” essay protested the parochial tendencies of the Irish theater, with the directors “shy of presenting Ibsen, Tolstoy or Hauptmann,” or even second-raters like Sudermann, Bjornson, and Giacosa.² Amateur theatricals enliven the youth of Stephen Dedalus, as did charades for Leopold Bloom and undoubtedly many another late-Victorian Dubliner. The Dubliner has been as much a fancier...