8

In his history of the Abbey Theatre, W. G. Fay claims with some cause that the National Theatre Society was "first and foremost a theatrical, not a literary movement."^[56] When Yeats was turning his attention to London, Fay and his brother Frank were chief players in the vastly popular amateur theatre activity that grew out the ruins of the Literary Theatre. For if the Yeats-Martyn-Moore venture failed to create plays of lasting interest, to stage successful performances, or to grant the authors the satisfactions of self-expression, it succeeded in stirring others to create a National Theatre. This movement was not led by authors and did not aim to create great literature.

The last year of the Irish Literary Theatre, 1901, saw two main results of the enterprise: Yeats gave up on theatre in Ireland, and Ireland took up the theatre on its own in a large

[54] Horniman was the amanuensis for WBY's letter of 21 April 1902 to Frank Fay, which mentions a wealthy friend with an interest in Yeats's plays. The letter says that after a year's work by the company, this wealthy friend would consider an appeal "for capital to carry out [Yeats's] idea" (Wade, 371–72). Horniman's identity is concealed under a masculine pronoun, but it is clear that she was the "wealthy friend."

[55] James Flannery reproduces the letter of 8 October 1903 from Horniman to Yeats in which she decided on the cast of Tarot cards to subsidize the Irish National Theatre Company in Miss Annie F. Horniman and the Abbey Theatre (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), 9. Flannery also discusses three other letters in which Horniman interpreted the Tarot to predict Yeats's theatrical success. The earliest of these letters is dated 1 March 1903; it concludes that "work for love [would] bring Divine Wisdom."

[56] W. G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 106. Fay drives his point home by saying, "We of the Abbey made our theatre first and then got plays to suit it."

way. Padraic Pearse, future leader of the Easter Rebellion, reported that more than a dozen Irish dramas in Gaelic were presented in 1901 and 1902.^[57] There were plays in Gaelic at the Pan-Celtic Conference in Dublin and at the Feis in Galway during August 1901. The plays were, in some sense, authorless: at the request of amateur acting companies, and to meet the demand of massive and enthusiastic audiences, they were put together by priests, teachers, and patriotic women. Literary quality was irrelevant to their success. They formed the occasion for practicing Gaelic speech, singing Gaelic songs, wearing traditional clothes, and in general manifesting national enthusiasm. In scale, this dramatic activity amounted to a mass movement. Not only did the audiences run to 3,000 at the Dublin Rotunda, but the theatre movement had become part of an immense political network, the Gaelic League. With chapters in every village, town, and city, with a large bureaucratic organization, with the power to produce regular newsletters and booklets, the Gaelic League incited demand for plays, disseminated them throughout the population, organized their consumption, and spelled out their purpose: to educate Irishmen in the lost art of being Irish. Drama now was under way in Ireland, under the control not of a few Anglo-Irish authors but of a vast national apparatus.

Irish history during this period provides an instance of a literary movement leading to a social and industrial movement for self-reliance, which contradicts the vulgar Marxist assumption that the cultural superstructure will always echo the base. Not only did Yeats and Hyde's National Literary Society give utterance to the shift to cultural nationalism in 1892,^[58] but for another ten years literary and cultural societies continued the de-Anglicization of Ireland. For instance, in

[57] Hogan and Kilroy, 2:21.

[58] John S. Kelly in The Fall of Parnell and the Rise of Irish Literature: An Investigation , Anglo-Irish Studies, 2 (1976), 3, shows that Yeats in prophesying "that a political lull would mean a literary revival . . . was doing no more than voicing generally received opinion," but nonetheless the literary movement led to a political and economic movement of self-reliance; in effect, to the policy of Sinn Fein.

1903, the "Cork Celtic Literary Society" formed the "Cork Industrial Development Association" to regain the Irish market for Irish goods.^[59] And various nationalist clubs and newspapers aggressively carried forward the social revolution to make Ireland Irish. There were Irish cycling clubs, Irish singing groups, Irish hurling associations. The journalists worked to embarrass "shoneen" Irishmen into buying the caps, wearing the boots, eating the jam, spreading the mustard, speaking the language, playing the games, and naming their children according to the customs of their country. For instance, the peckish D. P. Moran, editor of the Leader , posted himself outside Catholic churches in Dublin nationalist districts in order to report on "the truly National congregation" emerging with "their recreant skins" clothed in a foreign covering.^[60] The message, more than implied, was that any Irishman not in Donegal tweeds and Ulster linens should walk in shame. In the United Irishman Arthur Griffith exposed those Dublin businesses that advertised abroad for work that could be done by Irishmen, as when he indignantly reported that Browne & Nolan, "which has gained more from the Irish revival than any other printing firm in Ireland," had advertised in the Glasgow Herald for a printer's case room foreman when scores of Irish compositors were out of work.^[61] Finally, both Moran and Griffith printed lists of Irish names, so that parents could at least "put an Irish name on every boy and girl born to the country." The great number of theatrical societies, carried forward by the momentum of this many-sided social revolution, themselves served the valuable propaganda service of representing on stage an ideal, spiritual, and militant version of that revolution as already achieved. Its slogan was Today, on the stage; tomorrow, on the streets .

These nationalist theatrical groups, even the most artistic ones such as "W. G. Fay's National Dramatic Society," were not only independent of Yeats; they were also profoundly op-

[59] United Irishman 11, no. 273 (21 May 1904): 4.

[60] Moran, "The Clothes We Wear," Leader , 20 October 1900, 117.

[61] United Irishman 10, no. 242 (20 November 1903): 5.

posed to him in their conception of drama. It is often noted that Yeats and the Fays had much in common. The Fays were actors in search of an author and capital; he was an author with capital in search of actors. Frank Fay and Yeats shared an interest in elocution, in grave and simple acting, and in "sincere" dramatic writing, by which both Fay and Yeats meant writing that was not commercial.^[62] It is also true that in his series of theatre reviews and essays for the United Irishman , Frank Fay made an obvious public appeal that Yeats should write plays for Ireland to be performed by amateur Irish actors, actors like those his brother directed. Yeats was, after all, Ireland's greatest poet and a famous man; they wanted his talent. But the Fays had their own conception of drama and nationalism, and they wanted Yeats only if he would take up the trade of playwright on their terms.^[63]

Frank Fay makes clear in his United Irishman articles just what those terms were. In the issue dated 4 May 1901, Fay wrote a criticism of Yeats's dramatic ideals as Yeats defined them in an essay on "The Theatre of Beauty" published in Poems (1901). A national theatre, for Fay, was first not a theatre of English plays about Ireland; second, not a theatre for the few; third, not a theatre acted by English professionals. It should ideally be an Irish language theatre with Irish actors, serving the "marvellously sympathetic, intelligent, and refined audience" who attended recent commemorations of Thomas Davis and Robert Emmet, the Gaelic League Oireachtas, and the Leinster Feis Concert—in short,

[62] See Fay's 23 November 1901 United Irishman article on "The Irish Literary Theatre" for a statement of Fay's belief that interesting writing was writing that was "sincere" and "uncommercial" (Frank J. Fay, Towards a National Theatre: The Dramatic Criticism of Frank J. Fay , ed. Robert Hogan [London: Oxford University Press; Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970], 83–86). Yeats most often opposes "sincerity" to "morality" rather than commercialism, as in "The Freedom of the Theatre" (Frayne and Johnson, 297–99).

[63] James W. Flannery does an excellent job of treating Frank Fay as a dramatic thinker in his own right, rather than simply as an elocutionist in Yeats's plays (W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976]). I depart from his account in emphasizing the populist-socialist grounds for Fay's antipathy to commercial theatre.

nationalists from the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and the United Irish League. These people, Fay tells Yeats, want more "vigorous themes" than those the poet finds in the land of faery. His plays may be charming, but "they do not send men away with a desire for deeds." If Yeats wanted to be an Irish playwright, he had to write what the Irish people needed, not what he might desire to write. If they were to be his audience, he had to be their voice.

Fay frankly stated his reservations about the literary products of the Yeats-Martyn-Moore combination. Their works, he says, show little "familiarity with the footlights"; written "in the study," they "won't act" on the stage. Ultimately, Fay allowed, Ireland might have a need for the more subtle effects of a theatre dedicated to art; but first it must begin as all national dramas had begun, with simple folk plays—miracle, morality, and mystery plays—that would feed the new popular appetite for native drama.

More important even than Fay's beliefs about the subjects and style of national drama was his belief about its economic basis. Both Fay and Yeats hated commercial theatre, but for different reasons. Yeats complained it had little use for fine writing, being a theatre of big stage effects, coarse oratory, and grandiose scenery. Fay disliked these features as well, but he had another reason for hating commercialism. When John Whitbread's popular theatre company took up a powerful political issue, like the land agitation in The Irishman , it turned the subject into a sideshow, with the conventions of melodrama and the circus tricks of the stage spectacular in the center ring.^[64] Fay said he wanted to jump the orchestra pit and murder the virtuous persons of such melodramas, and he lamented the popularity of the sensationalist trick of introducing the dreaded battering ram on stage during the climactic scene of eviction when bailiffs knocked down the doors of peasant cottages. This type of theatricality, in Fay's view, was just a way for English money to enable "Saxon swine" to fatten on the Irish by turning a colony into a cartoon.^[65] For Yeats,

[64] Fay, Towards a National Theatre , 27–29.

[65] Ibid., 53.

commercialism spoils the subtle aspirations to beauty of the individual artist; for Fay, it diverts the entire people from a recognition of their real oppression.

Fay discovered a dangerous affinity between business and amusement: the purpose of both is to defend the status quo. For an audience to be amused at the land question, to enjoy its conversion to a commodity, is to say yes to its settlement, while making a flight not just from reality, but from any thought of resistance to that reality. When letters to the press suggested that a national theatre could be formed by subscription from patrons or by floating a company for stockholders, Fay was furious: "We don't want any of the financial gang, who would run the Universe, Limited, if they could, in connection with an Irish National Theatre."^[66] The capitalist syndicates, he said, were "the real authors" of the plays seen in Dublin: the measure of a commercial play's merit was the amount of conspicuous expenditure on its production; its meaning was just business turned into an ideology.

The Irish culture industry, run by foreign investors, had been the subject of a public investigation by the indefatigable D. P. Moran in the pages of the Leader ,^[67] to which Fay and Yeats were regular subscribers. To its three theatres and two music halls, Dublin paid out £200 a working night, or roughly £60,000 a year. In addition, Dublin doubled the expense by importing "jingo panoramas, travelling circuses, merry-go-rounds," "Bray coons," and "dancing Grenadiers." The total for Dublin was again doubled for the country as a whole, so that Ireland, Moran calculated, paid out £250,000 a year for entertainment. What it got in return was "a regular night-school of Anglicization," and "powerful propaganda of the lowest . . . moral standards." Moran, a puritanical Catholic nationalist, was especially worried about the moral effect of a theatre in which "religion is besmeared; idling is glorified; cadging and thieving are presented as 'smart' arts; the heroes are cads and the heroines are—well, the modern theatre has a name for them—'women with a past.'" He described part of

[66] United Irishman , 11 May 1901; Fay, Toward a National Theatre , 56–58.

[67] Leader , 15 September 1900, 40.

the program on a typical evening at a Burgh Quay music hall: "One of [the comedian's] songs, which excited great applause, described . . . how he got seasick, another how he collected in church and went off with the proceeds, and a further 'lyric' was partly about a girl who falls off a bicycle, with the usual low jokes . . . which are invariably the point of such incidents."^[68] To Fay, such stuff was not only vulgar and ethically undignified, as it was to Yeats; and not only demoralizing and sinful, as it was to Moran; it was also an opiate of oppression administered by foreign capitalists, both exploitative and profoundly alienating. If there were to be an Irish National Theatre, Fay argued, it must be created outside the capitalist culture industry, without the help of "financial bounders or aristocratic patrons." Basically, the difference between attitudes of Yeats and Fay on commercialism is that Fay, a naive socialist, sought freedom from money;^[69] Yeats, a naive aristocrat, sought freedom through money; Fay sought freedom by giving himself up to a political movement; Yeats sought freedom from political movements by achieving control over them.