Lady Gregory:  SPREADING THE NEWS

In her notes on the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which she was most influential in building up, Lady Augusta Gregory says that it was the desire of the players and writers who worked there to establish an Irish drama which should have a “firm base in reality and an apex of beauty.”  This phrase, which admirably expresses the best in the play-making going on to-day, finds most adequate illustration in the work of Synge, of Yeats, and of Lady Gregory herself.  The basis in reality of such jolly and robust comedies as her Seven Irish Plays and New Irish Comedies is clearly discernible.  They are in the tradition of the best early English comedy, from the miracle plays onward; of Hans Sachs’s Shrovetide Plays, and of Moliere’s dramatizations of medieaval fabliaux, as in The Physician in Spite of Himself.  Lady Gregory describes in her notes on Spreading the News how the play grew out of an idea of picturing tragic consequences from idle rumor and defamation of character.  It is certainly not to be regretted that she allowed “laughter to have its way with the little play,” and gave Bartley Fallon a share of glory from the woeful day to illuminate dull, older years.

The inhabitants of this same village of Cloon appear as old friends in other of Lady Gregory’s plays, with, as usual, nothing to do but mind one another’s business.  In The Jackdaw another absurd rumor is fanned into full blaze by greed; upon Hyacinth Halvey works the potent and embarrassing influence of too good a reputation.  Still other plays attain a notable height of beauty—­notably The Rising of the Moon and The Traveling Man. The Gaol Gate tells a story similar to that of Campbell of Kilmhor, with genuinely tragic effect.  She has written, besides, two volumes of Irish folk-history, Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which Mr. Yeats calls masterpieces of prose which one “can weigh with Malory and feel no discontent at the tally."[1] A writer who has produced such range and beauty of works, from very human, characteristic comedy and farce to fine, poignant tragedy, besides writing excellent stories and contributing largely to an important experimental theatre, is secure of her share of fame.

The “Removable Magistrate” is apparently one appointed by British officialdom; this one, having just come from the Bay of Bengal, is going to fit upon the natives of Cloon methods which may have worked in a rather different district.

The song “with a skin on it,” which Bartley sings, is given in Lady Gregory’s Seven Short Plays (Putnam, 1909).

[Footnote 1:  Appendix to The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats, volume II, (Macmillan, 1912).]

Winthrop Parkhurst:  THE BEGGAR AND THE KING