4—
Authors and Actors:
The Irish National Theatre Society, Ltd., As a Joint Stock Enterprise

On 27 December 1904, in buildings that had once housed the General Emigration Agent, the Dublin Total Abstinence Society, and a morgue, the Irish National Theatre Society opened the doors of the Abbey Theatre.^[1] In a reappraisal of the Irish theatre movement, David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens conclude that when W. B. Yeats mounted the stage to welcome the public, he had a right to feel proud:

Standing on the stage of the new theatre, speaking to an audience of six hundred people, Yeats might have felt that he was standing on the threshold of the most considerable achievement of his career. The dramatic movement in Ireland had been his doing more than any other's, and the new theatre was the tangible embodiment of his vision. He had conceived the idea as a patriotic undertaking, but he had not hesitated to alienate it from the environment which gave it its meaning when he felt that that environment threatened to stultify it. He had discovered both Lady Gregory and Synge and directed their undeveloped talents. If he had not discovered the Fays,

[1] In 1830 the property housed the Theatre Royal, which gave miscellaneous entertainments, excluding straight dramas. In 1839 the building was burned; after restoration, it opened under various names—Princess's Theatre, New Princess Theatre of Varieties, People's Music Hall, and remarkably, the National Theatre, by which name it was known up to three years before Horniman's purchase. The premises in Marlborough Street housed the General Emigration Agent in 1840; in 1863 the National Brotherhood of St. Patrick (a recruiting organization for the Fenians) took over the premises; following the Brotherhood was the Dublin Total Abstinence Society, for which the Fays sometimes performed in the late 1890s. Gerard Fay gathers this information in The Abbey Theatre: Cradle of Genius (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 79.

they at least discovered him. He was ruthless in getting his own way. He had eliminated Edward Martyn and George Moore as soon as the price of living with them had become too high. He had survived the defection of two of his best actors. A theatre had been created for his use, and it was beyond the influence of anyone except Miss Horniman. His plays and players had created an audience and impressed English audiences and critics. Nobody will now deny that he had been right in proclaiming that the only real service an artist can render his country is producing good art.^[2]

This summary puts the poet's massive activity on behalf of an Irish theatre under the category of "personal achievements," and, surely, Yeats as much as anyone is entitled to claim the credit involved. He had first had the idea of an Irish theatre in the 1890s; now he stood inside the realization of that idea as president of the Irish National Theatre Society and author of the main event on the first program, the verse-play On Baile's Strand. Greene and Stephens balance the achievements against their costs, noting that Yeats froze out his friends, stood his ground against the political complaints of his best actors,^[3] put himself under obscure obligations to his English patron, and made every ideal take second place to art; these things, they conclude, are the path to "the most considerable achievement of his career."

There is no better time to admit a generous admiration for the poet than when he is standing on the Abbey stage on 27 December 1904. Seeing history as the biography of a great man, however, has limits even in literary study. Greene and Stephens guard against the biographical fallacy by a careful choice of phrase: the dramatic movement's being "more [Yeats's] doing than any other's" implies that many others did

[2] Greene and Stephens, J. M. Synge, 1871–1909 (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 173.

[3] Dudley Digges and Maire T. Quinn resigned in protest against the performance of In the Shadow of the Glen. Under the guidance of Maud Gonne (who also resigned from the directorate), they joined the Cumann na nGaedheal Theatre Company, before leaving in the summer of 1904 to perform Irish plays at the St. Louis World's Fair (Hogan and Kilroy, 2:75; Maire nic Shiublaigh, The Splendid Years , [Dublin: James Duffy, 1955], 41–43).

their part as well, without claiming that all Yeats did was for the best of Irish theatre, or that without his efforts—say, if he had stayed in London with the Masquers in 1903—there would have been no Irish dramatic renaissance. Yeats's involvement, they note, placed the theatre movement beyond the influence of its audience ("alienate[d] from the environment that gave it its meaning") and under the influence of Horniman: a strange position for a national theatre, quaking with its own sort of stress. While the principle Yeats fought for, and Greene and Stephens say no one will now deny—"the only real service an artist can render his country is producing good art"—seems to me an incomplete statement of the complex relations between literature and politics, their vision of literary history through Yeats's eyes is admirably free of both apologetics and moral preaching.

This perspective still needs to be supplemented by others, however grand a view one gets from where Yeats stands, at stage front, looking out at a full house on opening night at the Abbey. There were also those in the lobby, in the wings, and back in the greenroom—all necessary to the movement—who had their own understanding of its nature and purpose, and whose points of view are neglected at the cost of distortion. We know from a close relative of the leading actress Maire nic Shiublaigh, or Mary Walker, that there were five members of the Walker family going about the business of the theatre that night.^[4] Two were selling programs in the lobby; one was stitching last-minute repairs in costumes backstage; and the remaining two—Mary Walker and her brother Frank—were waiting behind the curtain to go on stage in important roles. The Walkers, who had been with the National Theatre Society from the beginning, had joined because a flair for acting ran in the family, and because the family was profoundly committed to Irish nationalism. This was something the nation was doing on its own, and, in the spirit of Sinn Fein, they threw themselves into the theatre movement and helped as much as they could.

[4] Edward Kenny, preface to Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , XV.

The Walkers were not the only family that made a great contribution to the Irish National Theatre Society. The Fay brothers took in hand stage-management, occasional scene-painting, actor-training, and key dramatic roles, with W. G. starring in peasant comedies, and Frank in verse tragedies. On opening night, W. G. Fay would have been barking orders at the Walkers and others, seeing to it that the actors knew their cues and took things seriously; his brother Frank was usually pale, cold, and distant on opening nights.^[5] Somewhere backstage, he was exercising his voice as he prepared to go on stage as Cuchulain in On Baile's Strand , a role for which he lacked the stature and appearance, but had, abundantly, the powers of elocution. The Allgood sisters—from yet another theatrical family—were playful and excited on opening nights, more stage-struck than professional, more professional than patriotic. For them, this was their moment in the spotlight before a full house. Neither George Roberts nor Maire Garvey had their sort of talent or their sort of ambition; Roberts was the organizer, sometime secretary, supporting actor, and publisher, arranging for printing of the evening's theatre program and the house journal, Samhain. On this evening, remembering that he was the one who had first suggested in 1901 to the Fays that they produce Æ's Deirdre , George Roberts had reason to reflect that it was his impetus that had brought the theatre opening to pass.^[6] His fiancée Maire Garvey was a better actress than he was an actor and was equally committed to the political ideals of the movement.

These people were not a collection of extras and stars on special contract. In the movement at the start, they had been the movement ever since. Although they did not, in general, join in hope of money or stardom, the members of the com-

[5] Fay was "anxious" and "irritable" not only on opening nights, or previous to appearing before London critics, but also during rehearsals "when things don't come right," as he explains to Maire Garvey in a letter postmarked 8 November 1904 (ms. 8320 [8], NLI).

[6] Hogan and Kilroy, 2:28, records Roberts's claim that the Irish National Theatre Society was founded at his suggestion with a capital of less than five pounds.

pany were moved by a variety of other motives: an interest in theatre business or theatre arts; out of pure love of performance or commitment to the national cause. On one hand, there were the Walkers, who, in addition to liking theatre and having a flair for acting, were profoundly committed to national theatre because of their republican convictions. The theatre was their way of making a revolution; when there was a better way in 1916, Maire Walker gave up the stage for the streets, serving as a nurse in Jacob's Biscuit Factory, one of the Dublin locations held by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). On the other hand, there was W. G. Fay, for whom theatre was a trade, not a cause. He had plied this trade for years in the local entertainment markets of Dublin and in provincial towns, getting up tableaus and skits with amateur actors and an all-purpose drop-scene; opening night at the Abbey was for him the fulfillment of a business he had started and managed throughout.^[7]

As Padraic Colum remembers it, the real fuel on which the movement operated was national enthusiasm.^[8] The actors' eagerness for political independence gave them the solidarity and intensity of a sect, and the high spirits of a social club. It made these, for Mary Walker, worthy of the title The Splendid Years. In the summer of 1902, when they banded together and before Yeats joined them, they had agreed that all should work, and all be equal, and that they should not surrender their amateur status until they had made enough money to become a professional group independent of patrons. They

[7] W. G. Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre: An Autobiographical Record , (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 105–6, and passim. Fay says the Abbey Theatre "was the creation not of men of letters but of actors."

[8] Padraic Colum, The Road round Ireland (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 275. Seamus O'Sullivan (pen name for James Starkey), another original member of the INTS, corroborates Colum in "The National Theatre": "enthusiasm made up for all defects" of the amateur actors; they were "convinced [their] enthusiasm was . . . 'making history'"; because of the democratic, amateur character of the organization, "All had their particular work to do, and all did it . . . enthusiastically." According to O'Sullivan, the many books on the INTS had all made one mistake: "attributing the movement to one man only . . . Yeats" (The Rose and the Bottle [Dublin: Talbot Press, 1946], 116–26).

were a nest of families, a workshop of amateurs, and a cell of political revolutionaries.

On the opening night of the Abbey, surely a number of them thought, as several later wrote, that they were what had made the Irish theatre come to be, and not Horniman who had bought the hall or the poet at stage front taking his bows and making grand speeches. That is just what they had got him for: Yeats was to be the figurehead, as Æ told him when the presidency was offered, "the gilding at the prow of the vessel,"^[9] not its captain, not its crew.

2

According to Padraic Colum, who moved both in the circle of actors in Camden Street and in the company of the authors in the garden at Coole, the original members of the society for a long time regarded Yeats as a "great poet, an influential literateur, and a dramatist more concerned with lyrical lines than with situations. They did not suspect he was an excellent business man . . . and that it was his ambition to be the director of the movement."^[10] But as Colum came to realize, Yeats had big plans: at forty, Shakespeare had already had the Globe; Goethe had had the Weimar Theatre; Yeats had to have the Abbey.

In December 1904 it was doubtful just who had the Abbey and who was in control of the Irish National Theatre Society. Although it had surrendered much of its original democracy—members no longer had much to say about who played what parts, or where the company toured, or what program it staged—the society was still constituted under rules of gover-

[9] Lady Gregory quotes Æ's letter in Our Irish Theatre (New York: Capricorn Books, 1965), 31. When Frederick Ryan wrote to WBY asking him to serve as president of the "National Dramatic Society," he told him that the first order of business was for the president to make a speech on the plans and prospects of the new organization, "and of course there is no one who could do it so well as you." Yeats, it appears, was elected as a speech-maker by members who did not realize what he might say (Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 2:102).

[10] Colum, Road round Ireland , 278.

nance. These rules had been drawn up by Æ in February 1903 in order to prevent either a literary or a political veto of a play. The rules guaranteed that plays, usually nominated by the executive, should only be performed if approved by a three-quarter vote of the full membership.^[11] The society, therefore, was still its original members, mostly actors, not simply its president, and it was to the society that the use of the Abbey had been given.

What the members did not realize is that Horniman meant the theatre to belong to Yeats. He was her Wagner; the theatre was to be his Bayreuth. When Yeats had granted her, as she put it, "the right to call myself 'artist,'"^[12] by designing costumes for The King's Threshold and The Shadowy Waters , she gave them the richness, cut, and fashion of the operatic getup for a Siegfried or Brunhilda.^[13] If she had a dramatic wish of

[11] Æ to WBY [February 1903]; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:119. For the background to Æ's revision of the rules, see Hogan and Kilroy, 2:48–51; James W. Flannery, W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre: The Early Abbey Theatre in Theory and Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 324ff.; and Peter Kuch, Yeats and AE (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1986), 210–13, 215. The first rules were precipitated by rejection of Colum's The Saxon Shillin' , suspected of being politically motivated; the second set of rules was made necessary because Yeats successfully blocked production of Cousins' Sold , even though Cousins had the support of three-quarters of the society's membership. The new rules, introduced at a meeting on 2 June 1903, and registered in Dublin on 30 December 1903, established a reading committee of Yeats, Russell, Colum, and the Fays (Hogan and Kilroy, 2:65; George Russell, Letters from AE , ed. Alan Denson [London: Abelard-Schuman, 1962], 52, 229; note, however, that Denson misdates Æ's letter to Yeats as [April 1904], but it must have been written in September 1905, as explained in Saddlemyer, 79).

[12] Quoted in James W. Flannery, Miss Annie F. Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , Irish Theatre Series, no. 3 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1970), 15.

[13] Edward Malins argues that Horniman's costumes were cut to Wagnerian patterns ("Annie Horniman, Practical Idealist," Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 3, no. 2 [November 1977]: 21). Malins also argues, less convincingly, that the costumes were successful. Thomas Kettle, reviewing The King's Threshold in New Ireland , 17 October 1903, treated them with sharp irony, saying the costumes were "of a richness almost barbaric" and "beyond the capacity of any but a society journal to record," though he understood, presumably from Horniman or Yeats, that they were designed according to "a scheme marvellous in its emotional and symbolic value." Lennox Robin-son, coming upon them years later in a closet at the Abbey, was unfavorably impressed; at the time, the Fays were horrified; and Yeats was merely constrained to be patient, apparently begging Horniman, "No more jewels next time!" (Horniman to George Roberts, 31 October 1903, Roberts Papers, Theatre Collection, Harvard).

her own, it seems from all available evidence that it was for Yeats, like Wagner, to create at the Abbey a new kind of dramatic song, a new style of performance, and noble, costumed, heraldic figures for a grand fantastic myth like the Nibelungenlied . She did not care, as she was ready to tell anyone, about "hole and corner Irish ideas." "If anyone thinks," she wrote Synge, "that 'Irish' or 'National' are anything to me beyond mere empty words to distinguish a Society . . . they are much mistaken."^[14] In fact, her intention is there to read in her open letter to Yeats making the formal offer of the theatre in April 1904: "I have a great sympathy with the artistic and dramatic aims of the Irish National Theatre as publicly explained by you [Yeats, the president of the INTS] on various occasions."^[15] James Flannery observes that Horniman's statement "contained a number of ambiguous point and, as time passed and policies became more precisely defined, inevitable conflicts began to arise"^[16] —especially because what was taken for language of open generosity and large entitlement was intended as strictly definitive. Horniman's "great sympathy" is with the public explanation by Yeats of his aims, not with the Irish National Theatre itself. In fact, we saw in the preceding chapter that these aims—"The Samhain Principles" of 1903 and 1904—explicitly forbade the production of nationalist propaganda.

At the opening of the Abbey, the difference between the sensations of justifiable pride felt on the one hand by Yeats and on the other by the rest of the troupe was that he knew the fact of the matter and they did not; he knew he had the theatre for "the carrying out of [his] artistic dramatic schemes

[14] Horniman to Synge, 7 January 1906, quoted in Hogan and Kilroy, 3:58–59.

[15] Horniman to WBY, April 1904, rpt. in Samhain: 1904 , 53.

[16] Flannery, Horniman and the Abbey Theatre , 12.

and for no other reason"; they had only a set of rules and their utility to the schemes of W. B. Yeats.^[17]

3

One year later, the theatre company was riven in two. The Walkers—every one of them—were gone; the Robertses were gone; Padraic Colum had left. All told, more than half of the company departed because they refused to become employees of the newly incorporated National Theatre Society, Ltd. Of course, they still had the rules of the old society, a legal claim to its name, part of its repertoire, and a little money. They could, as they did, form a rival company and enter the market to compete with the better-financed, better-housed, and more fully established Abbey.^[18] It was then that J. M. Synge wrote to Yeats that perhaps, since the defectors were about to divide the audience for Irish plays, the Abbey directors should make peace, at least with the most talented of them, such as Mary Walker, who had proved so useful in plays by Yeats and Synge. But Yeats replied that he was "delighted" that "the enemy" were rehearsing Colum's The Land: "A rival theatre," he observed, "would only show the power of ours. . . . We have now 400 pounds a year to spend on salaries and a fine theatre—all we have to do is hold firm."^[19] Yeats knew the power of capital and of the ownership of the means of production. When Arthur Griffith delivered the acid obituary—"Everybody will be sorry for the conver-

[17] Horniman to Synge, 7 January 1906, Hogan and Kilroy, 3:58–59; and Horniman to Yeats, 9 January 1906, Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:58.

[18] In an uncharacteristically acidulous foreword to Nic Shiublaigh's Splendid Years , Padraic Colum remarks bitterly on the bad fortune of the dissident actors' Theatre of Ireland. The difference between the Abbey and its rivals, according to Colum, is not in the quality of their work, but in the quantity of their financial resources. The Theatre of Ireland "could only give performances now and again in different places, while the Abbey, even though it was in the doldrums at the time, had continuity and a fixed place." As for the dramatists, "they got nothing, absolutely nothing," not a performance fee, or royalty, or opening night dinner.

[19] WBY to Synge, 6 January 1906; Saddlemyer, 98–99.

sion of our best lyric poet into a limited liability company"—he did not suspect what a natural captain of industry Yeats would make.^[20]

4

It is sometimes said that when the theatre obtained a building and began to tour, it "inevitably" had to put into effect "more businesslike relations" than were necessary in the original voluntary, low-budget, amateur organization. But the theatre did not simply grow and prosper; its entire character was forcibly altered in a way perceptible to all its members and to the press. This change was no accident caused by incorporation; it was its very aim.

Before the crucial meeting of 22 September 1905, when Yeats proposed turning the company into a joint stock business, he wrote to John Quinn that he was "going to Dublin to preside at a meeting to put an end to democracy in the theatre."^[21] The introduction of coercion was, as Yeats said, "an extremely complicated business," which perhaps only the poet fully understood; it involved confidential negotiations between Yeats and Horniman, Yeats and his future co-directors (Synge and Lady Gregory), Yeats and both Fays, Yeats And AE, AE and the actors, then Yeats as president and the actors, Yeats's father and certain actors, Yeats's father and Yeats. Throughout, the poet held his cards close to his chest, except when showing part of his hand to one or another coconspirator. The whole period was rife with bluffing, bribing, coaxing, threatened rebellions by the actors, and an actual coup by the Protestant playwrights. Finally, it appears, there were really two changes proposed for the INTS; the first was to issue stock to investors; the second, to put actors on salary. They both had the effect of bringing to an end the last vestiges of a cooperative democratic theatre society.

[20] Arthur Griffith, "All Ireland," United Irishman 16, no. 367 (10 March 1906): 1; rpt. in Hogan and Kilroy, 3:62–64.

[21] Wade, 461.

Yeats first suggested the plan for a joint stock company to AE (then involved in yet another attempt to rewrite the society's rules to set up a business committee and restructure the reading committee) as a legal device to give the directors control over the society.^[22] Although AE had earlier been the actors' advocate and the architect of democratic principles, on this occasion he want along with Yeats's maneuver. AE had apparently had one quarrel too many with Yeats.^[23] Having fought with him a number of times (fights rooted in fundamentally different attitudes to life and art), AE resigned the field to Yeats in April 1904 when he withdrew from INTS membership, striking the attitude of a noble man, his pride wounded, facing the facts and calling it quits: "I believe in resigning I have acted for the interests of the Society. Mr Yeats has more power to aid the Society than I have. His literary work in the future is likely to be altogether dramatic in form and I could not feel justified in opposing any course which he took, as I believe to a great extent the success of the Society is bound up with the future of his work."^[24] During the summer of 1905, the victor sought the help of the vanquished in dealing with the actors—"It is a very complicated business," Yeats wrote AE, "and requires a great deal of tact, that is why we are leaving it to you." AE apparently "did not feel justified in opposing any course which [Yeats] took"; indeed, though

[22] Russell, Letters from AE , ed. Denson, 52–53; Saddlemyer cites a letter from W. G. Fay reporting to Lady Gregory on 21 September 1905: "By some good luck Mr Yeats asked [AE] what of turning it into a limited liability company with Mr Yeats yourself Miss H. and Mr. Synge as a board of directors and he took to it right off" (Saddlemyer, 82; see also notes on 74–75, 79, 81). Yeats was blunt about his motives in a letter to Florence Farr: "We are turning [the INTS] into a private Limited Liability Co. in order to get control into a few hands" 6 October 1905; Wade, 463; discussed in William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 292.

[23] The quarrel that precipitated AE's resignation concerned his grant of American performance rights of Deirdre to Dudley Digges and Maire Quinn, the actors who resigned over In the Shadow of the Glen . To Yeats, AE's act was both disloyal and illegal. The fullest account of the dispute is in Kuch, Yeats and A.E. , 220–22.

[24] Russell to George Roberts, secretary, Irish National Theatre Society, 23 April 1904; Denson, ms. 9967, 141, NLI; quoted in Kuch, Yeats and A.E. , 222.

Yeats was never sure "how far [AE] would go in support" of him,^[25] AE collaborated fully with him in carrying through a final settlement that granted Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge effective mastery of the society.^[26]

The plan was then presented to the actors by Yeats as Horniman's wish.^[27] She had, he said, made a large investment in the Abbey, and this investment required the insurance of formal incorporation. Indeed, Horniman took up the subject of financial security herself and asked that her voting power in the INTS, Ltd. should correspond exactly to her capital investment, as in the other corporations on the stock exchange in which she held shares:

Dear Mr. Yeats,

I have already spent nearly £4000 in the Abbey Theatre and it is now proposed that I should aid in making the society into a Limited Company. I am most willing to do this but I consider the value of the shares should bear an exact proportion to the voting power. I have always been accustomed to this in the companies in which I already hold shares and in these Companies I obviously hold a position with a very small voting power.

Yours sincerely,
A. E. F. Horniman^[28]

Problems of interpretation arising from this letter suggest the web of plots and counterplots, feints and strategems, during this transformation of the society.^[29] If it was "now proposed"

[25] WBY to Lady Gregory, 27 September 1905; Greene and Stephens, Synge , 192; quoted in Saddlemyer, 83.

[26] Saddlemyer, 75.

[27] Ibid., 79.

[28] Hogan and Kilroy, 3:35.

[29] Peter Kavanagh suggests that Horniman requested that "the Society assure her of its good faith by becoming a limited liability society, thereby protecting her against any serious financial loss" (The Story of the Abbey Theatre, from Its Origins in 1899 to the Present [London: Devin-Adair, 1950], 51). Hogan and Kilroy believe Horniman's 26 September letter contradicts Kavanagh's conclusion. Clearly, incorporation did not in the event protect Horniman from serious financial loss; she lost £13,000 anyway, largely as a result of paying the actors' wages, but that in itself does not mean that she may not have made the request for other reasons. Those reasons were doubtless deeply politic, and we may be sure, if of nothing else, that WBY was "the Machiavelli behind the change" (Hogan and Kilroy, 3:35).

to Horniman that she aid in the incorporation of the INTS, then she could not have demanded it in the first place as a means to protect herself against financial loss. But before taking the letter at face value, one must note the salutation: when Horniman wrote to the poet frankly, she addressed him by his pseudonym in the Order of the Golden Dawn, "Dear Demon"; when she executed an official action, almost always with his consultation, and often at his dictation, she addressed the letter, "Dear Mr. Yeats." Furthermore, the letter was written from the Standard Hotel in Dublin; Yeats was in town at the time for the INTS meetings; beyond a doubt, he met Horniman regularly, so that she need not have relied on the municipal postal service to communicate with him. The letter is addressed to Yeats, but it is plainly for others to read and for him to employ in bringing about an end to democracy in the theatre. It was to Yeats's advantage to have Horniman lay conditions upon his freedom of maneuver; those conditions were themselves a maneuver, part of the plan to end the one-person, one-vote democracy, while at the same time preserving for all members a small share in the business of the society.

Even if she had demanded it, Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory were not about to cede control of the theatre to Horniman just as it was wrested from the actors. After getting the actors to agree that the theatre should be incorporated to limit its liability and to raise further capital,^[30] Yeats had it registered under the Friendly and Industrial Societies Act, according to which no member could hold more than 200 shares, and members had a vote for each share held.^[31] Under this arrangement, Horniman could not keep enough, and the actors could not buy enough, to threaten Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory. The writer-directors each held 100 shares, while the actors were given one each. In the future, actors could vote, but they could carry no motions.

[30] Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , 71.

[31] Letter from a former member of the INTS, "All Ireland," United Irishman 16, no. 367 (10 March 1906): 1.

Turning the INTS into the INTS, Ltd., was just the first stage of the process of eliminating democracy in the theatre; the second stage was putting the actors under contract. According to Mary Walker, the company members consented to the plan of floating a company, not knowing that the directors would receive more shares than actors, and believing that "if we worked hard enough . . . we would be self supporting within a year."^[32] But when they discovered that they were no longer consulted by the directors about the future of the company, they became unhappy with the loss of comradeship and cooperation.^[33] Walker remembers Yeats then supporting a motion that at least the leading actors should turn professional, taking salaries from Miss Horniman in exchange for submission to the control of the directorate.

As a matter of fact, the two plans were intertwined from the start. On 12 June 1905, in a letter addressed to Yeats as president, Horniman officially offered the Irish National Theatre Society £500 a year to subsidize salaries for "certain of its members."^[34] Early in August, Yeats brought up the idea with Æ of setting up a scheme "which will enable Mary Walker and Frank Fay to get paid."^[35] W. G. Fay had begun to discuss the idea with actors by early September, when he wrote to Yeats that it was impossible to "pay anyone for doing certain work and then vote him or her out. . . . In a business . . . there can be no democracy."^[36] Yeats was not slow to see an administrative opportunity in this conflict between democracy and wage labor. Although the issue of formal incorporation came before the INTS on 22 September (it was actually registered on 24 October 1905), and the issue of formal employment was presented for a vote shortly afterwards, they

[32] Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , 71.

[33] William M. Murphy quotes a passage from Holloway's journal entry for 25 October 1905 documenting Walker's recollection of a change of spirit: "Since the Society turned into a limited liability company some weeks ago, things have not gone smoothly as heretofore, and a big change in the personnel of the players is likely to occur at any moment" (Prodigal Father , 292).

[34] Quoted in Saddlemyer, 72.

[35] WBY to Æ, 3 August 1905, NLI; quoted in Saddlemyer, 79.

[36] W. G. Fay to WBY, 8 September 1905; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:36.

were from the beginning two aspects of a single scheme to gain control.

5

An examination of the way the plan for professionalization was put into effect illuminates its deeper consequences for the actors and the national theatre. When theatregoer Joseph Holloway first heard of the plan on 27 September 1905, he wrote in his diary: "Miss Horniman has offered to pay the artists from this out. . . . Miss Horniman is a wonder!"^[37] Certainly, turning professional had advantages: the actors would not have to work two jobs, they could be paid for doing what they did best, and they would be free to take the Abbey's shows on the road to rural Ireland, England, and America. The Fay brothers and the Allgood sisters looked upon the change in this light; in Frank Fay's terms, it was a chance to make the theatre their life work.^[38] But there were also disadvantages to turning professional, and, while most of the other actors saw the disadvantages, theatre historians had not given them much weight.

At the general meeting, the actors raised a number of objections to the change.^[39] They pointed out that, first, the move was premature, the actors having already agreed to work one more year as amateurs in order to raise money through ticket sales for eventual distribution to actors; second, that it was unnecessary, since they would work as hard without pay as with it, and more enthusiastically as equal members than as subordinate employees; third, that it was ill-conceived, since it might well have the consequence of destroying "the individual character of the movement"; and fourth, that it was in violation of the society's first principle, laid down in 1902: "that its independence as a national movement was to be se-

[37] Holloway, 59.

[38] Frank Fay to Synge, 14 September 1905; Hogan and Kilroy, 38; and Saddlemyer, 80.

[39] Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , 70–73.

cured only through the efforts of its members." But in spite of these arguments, and the support of the two Walkers, Padraic Colum, George Roberts, Fred Ryan, Mary Garvey, and George Starkey, the directors easily carried the motion to put actors on salary. After all, they each had a hundred votes to an actor's one.

The deeper disadvantages—far greater than a broken agreement or violated principle—appeared after the plan was put into operation. Once actors signed contracts, they stopped being primarily artists and nationalists; they became employees, valuable according to their walk, their voice, and their general capacity for theatrical dissimulation. They were hired by the directors according to terms, and dismissible with a month's notice at the pleasure of those directors. If before "hard work and enthusiasm had been the measure of the members' sincerity,"^[40] after signing a contract the only measures were Horniman's money and their technical skill; enthusiasm and sincerity were qualities of no determinate value. Upon signing a contract, they instantly lost all freedom to direct the destiny of the theatre and establish in their own practice a new kind of society, the extra-artistic, extra-commercial objective that gave the society, in their minds, its "individual character." Turning professional led toward a system of bosses and workers, the breakdown of relations between workers through unequal pay and competition for scarce labor, the alienation of the workers from their work, and reification of their skills.

The actors, of course, were under no absolute compulsion to enter into a contract with the INTS, Ltd. But Yeats had the theatre, a subsidy, the body of dramatic work, the allegiance of the stage manager W. G. Fay, and the custom of the audience they had built up; they had only membership status under revised and irrelevant rules. It is some indication of their awareness of what might be lost through turning professional, and their commitment to another idea of society, that most of the actors refused.

[40] Ibid., 71.

The ways in which the terms of the contract were set, and the ways in which they were rejected, illustrate the qualitative change professionalization made in the society. Yeats's essential aim, as mentioned before, was to pay Frank Fay and Mary Walker, no one else, since these two were key players in his verse tragedies. But it must have become clear right away that once one actor was paid, all must be, or else the rest, however valuable they might have been before, would see that they were now to be regarded as comparatively worthless. A wage system is a total system; it overwhelms, encompasses, and ultimately renders obsolete other standards of evaluation.

W. G. Fay was hired by the director as their manager, put on the highest salary, and instructed to bargain with the actors, after counseling with the directors.^[41] Next to himself, his brother Frank Fay was given the top rate for an actor—twenty-five shillings a week—with a supplement for his voice instruction. Sara Allgood, the leading comedienne in Lady Gregory's plays, was offered the top rate, a little more than Mary Walker, the leading actress in Yeats's tragedies. But her brother Frank Walker and her lover George Starkey, though sincere and enthusiastic members of the company, were usually cast in supporting roles; therefore, they were to be offered only ten shillings a week (Fay subsequently sweetened the offer to Walker by five shillings at the insistence of Walker's sister, a valuable property). This scheme had rapid effects; the actors began to fear and detest W. G. Fay, once their cohort, now the factor of the executive.^[42] Mary Walker was envious

[41] In September, before the revision of the constitution, W. G. Fay reported to Yeats his trouble in bargaining with Starkey, Roberts, and Walker, who refused to see the stage-manager as anything more than an equal member of the society (8 September 1905 [NLI]). By December, Fay had still not succeeded in putting enough actors under contract to form the cast for a performance, but he was prepared to hire prospective talents from the reserve army of Dublin unemployed (W. Fay to WBY, 4 December 1905, Library of Trinity College, Dublin [TCD]). The fullest record of documents relating to the contract negotiations appears in Saddlemyer, 85–87.

[42] William M. Murphy eloquently describes the change of perspective on the Fays: "Those who had originally worked with the Fays now saw the two brothers as sergeants in a regiment led by three generals who were noteven really 'Irish,' while over the generals, a grey eminence in the background, lurked a dictator in the person of a rich Englishwoman who hated the Irish" (Prodigal Father , 296).

of Sara Allgood, who got paid a few shillings more; Frank Walker was humiliated by the fact that his sister was to be paid double his own salary; and Arthur Sinclair held out for more money, seeing that many veterans were not going to come to terms. Holloway nicely describes the final exodus: "Roberts took his girlfriend Miss Garvey with him when he left. Frank Walker left 'in a hump' at being offered fifteen shillings a week, taking his sister, his sister taking her lover Starkey."^[43]

It is significant that the actors left as sisters, brothers, lovers, and old friends. To pay them according to their skill as actors was certainly "rational," but it is not how people value their friends, family, teachers, or themselves. In fact, this is a classic case of "rationalization," in Weber's sense of the term: the rapid organization of society according to a single function, market value.^[44] Once the actors compared their separate offers and the different duties spelled out in the contracts, they had the unpleasant vision of the salary list as an inventoried social order, and they saw themselves as commodities of perfectly calibrated values and completely specified functions. Instead of a society in which there were ties of family loyalty, personal affection, political commitment, and theatrical enthusiasm, there was a business in which there were strict divisions of labor and value.

Mary Walker's final break with the Abbey illustrates the powerful effect of the change of status from member to employee. In October and November, she at first bargained on his behalf for a higher salary for her brother (fifteen as opposed to ten shillings a week); then promised to sign, but did not; then signed, then withdrew. Even her brother wa-

[43] Holloway (12 January 1906), 68.

[44] Max Weber, Max Weber: Selections in Translation , trans. E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 331–40; see also Robert Nisbet, "The Rationalization of Authority—Weber," in The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 141–48.

vered from September to December, bitter at the terms of the contract, but still working at the theatre and talking of going on.^[45] On 22 December 1905, however, after a dinner with Synge and Thomas Kettle at the Nassau Club, Yeats and Fay went to the Abbey in order to get Mary Walker to sign her contract, as, with some regrets, she had again agreed to do, with an arrangement that with additional duties in taking care of costumes, her wages would be raised to equal those of Sara Allgood.^[46] They found that Miss Walker ("such a goose," Lady Gregory said of her)^[47] could not bring herself to "sign [the contract] on the spot but promised to sign and send it before morning."^[48] At this new vacillation, a torrent of eloquence erupted from Yeats, "his whole being shaken by fits of the most uncontrollable rage."^[49] In his excitement, he threatened her with the law, and left, returning to the Nassau Club flushed, still trembling with exaltation. The next morning, Miss Walker brought in her signed contract, and Yeats dashed off a letter stating the terms of her employment. The letter says that she had been appointed wardrobe mistress at two shillings and sixpence a week, for which she must see that the costumes in the men's and women's dressing rooms were "in good order not out of repair, not eaten by the moths, and to set them out before performances."^[50] The letter concludes with something between an apology and a criticism: "I am sorry that I was so emphatic with you last night; but I have been waiting so many days on in Dublin to get the thing settled, that I did not look forward with much pleasure to an-

[45] On 19 December 1905 Frank Walker had not yet severed his connection with the INTS, Ltd., but he told Holloway that he intended to do so—possibly to learn what arguments Holloway and other friends present could give for his remaining on with the society (Holloway, 65).

[46] Synge to Lady Gregory, 5 January 1906 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library); Saddlemyer, 91; the fullest account of the rough courtship of Maire nic Shiublaigh is in Murphy, Prodigal Father , 296–99.

[47] Lady Gregory to WBY, 3 January 1906 (Berg Collection); Saddlemyer, 86.

[48] Synge to Lady Gregory, 5 January 1906.

[49] Nic Shiublaigh, Splendid Years , 15.

[50] Yeats to Maire nic Shiublaigh, 23 December 1905 (TCD); Saddlemyer, 94.

other period of wasted time." Miss Walker read the letter and resigned.

With Mary Walker, "extraordinarily white and languid," taking refuge among the poet's father and sisters at Gurteen Dhas (the Yeats home), the other directors busily tried to find out what had gone wrong.^[51] J. B. Yeats offered a number of explanations, most of them laying the blame on his son, whom he called "a mad poet" "in the hands of vulgar intriguers." Mary Walker was upset because her brother was upset, because Sara Allgood was paid more, because Yeats attacked her vanity, because he tried to make her think little of herself, because it was immodest for a woman to examine the wardrobes of the male actors (especially, Lady Gregory remarked in sympathy, the wardrobes of new employees "we know not of what class"),^[52] because it seemed that both Yeats and Fay—the whole management—had turned against her. In a long letter of remonstrance to his old friend WBY, AE summed up the whole business best by telling Yeats to ask himself "whether you did not bully and worry Miss Walker into joining you against her own wish and whether as a gentleman you are right in trying to bully and threaten her whatever your legal rights may be."^[53]

There is no doubt that Yeats was a disaster as a diplomat. In fact, he freely admitted what AE accused him of—that he wanted to be a "general autocrat in all literary and theatrical matters," and looked forward to this occasion as an opportunity to let the actors know that he was a dangerous man who "[knew] his own mind, [had] an intolerable tongue, and delight[ed] in enemies." "This theatre must have," he decided, "somebody in it who is distinctly dangerous."^[54] Putting Lady Gregory and Synge on notice that he was assuming the role of strong man, he urged the directors to bring suit

[51] J. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 6 January 1906 (NYPL); quoted in Murphy, 298.

[52] Lady Gregory to Synge, 10 January 1906 (TCD); Saddlemyer, 107.

[53] AE to WBY [January? 1905]; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:151–55.

[54] WBY to Synge [2 January 1906] (TCD); Saddlemyer, 88.

against Mary Walker for damages sustained as a result of her delay in coming to a decision—the lost gate receipts from a possible tour of English theatres. Whatever excesses of personality appeared in Yeats's drive for theatrical authority, the repellent features do not manifest themselves in the letter of appointment to Mary Walker: its language is not perfectly gracious, nor is it absolutely irritable; it speaks with the voice of politely restrained irritability. Although Mary Walker was no doubt upset by many things—her brother's disappointment, her rival's prestige, Fay's bossiness, and Yeats's high-handedness—the underlying problem with the letter is that it is a letter of employment from an executive to an employee, a legal instrument for turning Mary Walker into a menial laborer, a maid at 2/6 a week, to whom the employer may freely speak in whatever tones of severity or command he is disposed to use. In short, it is an eminent example of what relations within the company would be like in the future, a signal illustration of "the binding nature of a contract" that Yeats wanted to establish in the actors's minds.^[55] To Mary Walker, such contractual relations seemed improper, cruel, hostile, and finally unacceptable.

6

For the members of the INTS to accept money from Horniman was implicitly to acknowledge her superiority and their inferiority; to accept the dominance of theatre business, the submission of political nationalism. The choice was driven home in the case of Padraic Colum. The directors certainly wanted to keep Colum with the company. He was popular all around—with "the hundred percent nationalists," the "literary coteries," and the general public.^[56] Moreover, Colum was Catholic, and without him nearly all of the regular playwrights would have been Protestant, so that a division would have been made between Protestants who wrote plays and

[55] WBY to Synge [?3 January 1906] (TCD); Saddlemyer, 89.

[56] Padraic Colum, Three Plays (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1963), 6.

Catholics employed to act them. As Yeats had written on an earlier occasion, the loss of Colum "would . . . put [the directors] in an impossible situation."^[57]

Colum's plays were popular with good reason. If the plays of Yeats or Synge embody themes of rich intellectual significance in Irish stage scenes, those of Colum embody themes of intimate and recognizable social significance in their real setting. Irish audiences recognized themselves in the farmers of The Land , with its setting at the end of the Land Wars, its agonized generational conflicts between father and son about the value of the old rural way of life, its depiction of the desperation of small fields and small futures leading to emigration, and its representation of love as disruptive but not improper.^[58] Colum's play did not win favor by public worship of nationalist icons or by chorus-leading of any kind; it fulfills itself in the evenhanded dramatization of a single question: with the Land War won, what after all were those little farms worth? Perhaps the land could not heal the scars—greed, brutal devotion, exhaustion—of the old or satisfy the spiritual hunger of the young.^[59] The answers were not comforting; as Cornelius Weygandt noticed, the fit left for America, and the drudges remained behind to do their little best for themselves and Ireland.^[60] All these elements suggested to the audi-

[57] WBY to Lily Yeats, 25 December 1903; Wade, 416.

[58] "Spealaodin" pegged Colum's Broken Soil as "immature" and "inadequate" in a 12 December 1903 United Irishman review of the performance at Molesworth Hall, but the play was vigorously defended by Oliver St. John Gogarty as "a national drama in a fuller sense, perhaps, than any yet presented," blessedly free of "folk smoke" and mysticism (United Irishman 10, no. 251 [19 December 1903]: 6). In a review of the year's performances, "D O'D" praised Colum most highly, christening him "the poet of the dawn" as opposed to the evening twilight of Yeats and AE (United Irishman 11, no. 267 [9 April 1904]: 6). M. C. Joy took up this identification in an essay on the poetry of several generations of Irish writers, saying that Colum offered "the poetry of a new life and a new hope" (United Irishman 11, no. 268 [16 April 1904]: 3).

[59] Zack Bowen rightly praises The Land for its objectivity, "which leaves no character unscathed or appearing to have all the answers" (Padraic Colum [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970], 73).

[60] Weygandt, Irish Plays and Playwrights (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 204.

ence the playwright's familiarity with their historical dilemmas and his basic good faith in representing them.

Yeats and Synge gave the Irish a piece of their minds; Colum gave them a piece of themselves. They exploited the image of the Irish tramp or tinker as a symbol of individualism, imagination, or freedom; he showed what it was like to have one in the family when he wrote Broken Soil (revised as The Fiddler's House ). The wandering fiddler of a father brings his daughters endless worry, poverty, shame, and a hard outlook for husbands, as well as heart-rending love for a man full of the vanity of genius. In Maire's sacrifice of love for family, Colum drew back the curtain of Irish spiritual idealism to permit a glimpse of Irish erotophobia pulling the strings . . . a brief glimpse, which the audience could choose not to admit that it had seen.^[61] Synge's plays were themselves a problem for the Irish, but Colum used the Ibsen problem-play to locate the audience within its own land. Without his collaboration, the Abbey, supposedly a national theatre, would take on a more alien character.

Colum was not in Dublin during the acrimonious events of late November when contracts were offered, negotiated, and refused.^[62] On 3 January 1906, he wrote to Yeats: "As you are aware I voted for the establishment of a limited liability company in order to save the Society from a disastrous split. I come back to Dublin and I find the Society hopelessly shattered. The one thing to be done is to reunite the Society." Yeats, of course, wanted to smash the old democratic society, but to retain Colum. Colum himself felt a personal debt of loyalty to Yeats: Yeats was not only a great poet and an admirer of Colum's work, he had also been Colum's teacher in the art of writing plays, having helped with the many revi-

[61] Weygandt, who interviewed the playwright for ibid., notices this psychological analysis of idealism: "Sacrifice is rare in youth, and if it were not that Maire is afraid of her love for Brian McConnell, and gives up her home and takes to the road with her father partly because she fears her love for her lover, fears her powerlessness with him, it would hardly be in the course of nature that she would sacrifice so much for her sister" (204).

[62] Colum to WBY [3 January 1906]; Saddlemyer, 90.

sions of The Land .^[63] Yeats himself believed Colum was not only indebted to him but dependent on him; he told Synge that without the Abbey, Colum "would be chaos" as an artist.^[64] Thus the young Catholic playwright was presented with a dilemma: he could be an artist without nationalism or a nationalist without artistic opportunity. The directors of the Abbey were betting that he would think first of himself and his art when they asked him to sign a contract binding him to give all his dramatic work for the next five years to the INTS, Ltd.

It was in this confident, bluff, and hard-bargaining spirit that Yeats had Horniman write to Colum^[65] after he had appealed to her for the use of the Abbey by the old INTS. She said that she was sorry he intended to "imperil his artistic career for politics."^[66] At any rate, she did not intend to grant the use of the theatre to anyone but Yeats and the friends of Yeats, as she wrote on 9 January 1906, officially transferring the gift of the Abbey from the INTS to WBY and the INTS, Ltd.: "The theatre is a means for carrying out a certain theatrical scheme and as long as you continue in the same path, the theatre is at the disposal of you and your friends under whatever title you choose to use."^[67] That scheme, as Horniman understood it, was a theatre for art, not politics. Horniman, like Yeats, did not worry that Colum would finally resign from the Abbey; as she remarked, he knew "which side his bread [was] buttered

[63] Even in the midst of the INTS split, Colum wrote WBY, "I can assure you that you can always reckon on my loyalty to you personally & to my school"; when he finally resigned, Colum, having stated strongly his differences with Yeats's policy, went on to say that he would "always be proud of being a contemporary. To you . . . I owe much as a dramatist" (Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:151, 161).

[64] WBY to Synge [? 4 January 1906] (TCD); Saddlemyer, 90.

[65] In a letter to Synge [?3 January 1906], WBY let it be known that he had "dictated one or two letters in connection with the matter to Horniman because I want people to understand that we have her resources behind us—that will make them feel I am in earnest" (Saddlemyer, 90).

[66] Holloway, 13 January 1906, 66.

[67] Horniman to WBY, 9 January 1906 (NLI); Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:158.

on."^[68] This remark, penned from London to one playwright, rapidly made its way around Dublin, echoed among the groups of dissidents, and soon reached the ears of Colum himself.^[69] His choice at last appeared to be no choice: Horniman's money and Yeats's theatre, or Ireland's independence and a theatre for the people. Angry, embarrassed, reluctant, he resigned.

7

Yeats succeeded: he established control over an Irish theatre, kept it in operation, and put before the public plays he thought good, whether the public liked them or not. But the INTS, Ltd. was recognized as his theatre, or even Annie Horniman's, not as an Irish national theatre. On 10 March 1906 an "Irreconcilable" from the old INTS wrote the United Irishman to inform the public that an impostor was afoot in Ireland: "The National Theatre Society, Ltd., is a body run in the interest of one person, Mr. W. B. Yeats, who has proved himself capable of absorbing for his own personal ends the disinterested work of a large number of people given on the understanding that they were aiding in a work which was devoted primarily to the development of the highest interests of nationality in the country."^[70] This absorption of the work of others is a good case of what Foucault calls "colonization"—the encompassing of local structures of power by larger ones of a different type.^[71] A native, democratic, collective, and nationalist cultural movement was subsumed by a British-owned and

[68] Padraic Colum, "Ninety Years in Retrospect: An Interview Conducted by Zack Bowen," Journal of Irish Literature 2, no. 1 (January 1973): 24.

[69] Holloway (13 January 1906), 68.

[70] "All Ireland," United Irishman 16, no. 367 (10 March 1906): 1; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:62–64; Synge suggests the author is "one of the 'Irreconcilables'" in a 10 March 1906 letter to Lady Gregory (Berg Collection); Saddlemyer, 119.

[71] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–77 , ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972; rev. ed., 1980), 99ff.; Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism, and Critique (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 82–83.

Protestant-operated enterprise that was hierarchial and capitalist in character.

"Sound business principles" were clearly not the only objective of this colonization. The struggle in the theatre was a struggle for the nature of a future Ireland, and the issues of the national debate were the same issues argued within the Irish National Theatre Society. The first issue was Home Rule: would the Irish get it or not? If they did, would it be by English permission, under the leadership of the Anglo-Irish, or through the participation of the entire citizenry, directed perhaps by the Gaelic League? Second, the issue of property ownership, made prominent by Michael Davitt and the Land League, and by James Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican Party: could a nation of renters and employees be free, or was the nationalization of the land a condition of full nationality?^[72] Third, the issue of production, given importance by Æ and the Irish cooperative movement: could the Irish be economically self-sufficient, making out of their own resources products for their own markets, or would they be dependent on British capital in producing commodities for the British market?^[73]

In the directors' takeover of the INTS, all these issues were

[72] T. W. Moody supplies a complete history of Davitt's interest in Henry George's concept of private land ownership as the "root cause of poverty," with "no . . . justification in morality or reason." Although this position had little appeal for the mass of Irishmen, Davitt nonetheless held to it to the end of his political career; in 1902, he wrote: "I still hold . . . to this great principle, and I believe a national ownership to be the only true meaning of the battle-cry of the Land League—the Land for the People" (Some Suggestions for a Final Settlement of the Land Question , 6–7; quoted in Moody's Davitt and the Irish Revolution [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 540). Connolly did not succeed in making the Irish Socialist Republican Party a popular party either, but, since he was a close friend of Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Frederick Ryan (all deeply involved in nationalist theatre), his ideas cannot have been unknown to the players. See Ruth Dudley Edwards, James Connolly (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1981), 21–42.

[73] For recent accounts of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, see Trevor West, Horace Plunkett: Co-operation and Politics (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1986), and Henry Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man: A Biography of George William Russell "AE," 1867–1935 (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1975).

focused on the question of property. Oliver MacDonagh has described the introduction to Ireland of modern British concepts of property, which granted owners absolute control, "untrammelled legally by social obligations," free of all liens and entailments, and entitling owners to buy up holdings, eject residents, and dictate the use made of their property.^[74] As John Stuart Mill realized—in a passage that deeply influenced Davitt—the Irish had a traditional view of property that was less individualist and more qualified than the modern free market definition of the British:

Before the conquest, the Irish people knew nothing of absolute property in land. The land virtually belonged to the Irish sept; the chief was little more than managing member of the association. The feudal idea, which views all rights as emanating from a head landlord, came in with the conquest, was associated with foreign dominion, and has never to this day been recognised by the moral sentiments of the people.^[75]

That this communal idea was alive among the twentieth-century Irish, and among members of the original INTS, is shown by a Colum essay in the intellectual monthly Dana entitled "Concerning a Creamery."^[76] This excellent piece of journalism describes the reaction of farmers to a priest's proposal that they build a cooperative creamery, under the guidance of Horace Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organization Society. Colum believes that cooperation is not "something outside, something foreign" to Ireland; it is part of the Gaelic tradition of meitheal , a party of workers brought together for mutual aid, for example, when cutting turf, weaving cloth, or building a house. More recently, Colum goes on, peasants have had a custom called a "join": many farmers, each unable to buy a spraying machine or cream separator, put their money together to purchase one that all will use. This is not, for Colum, merely a matter of necessity; it springs from "the feel-

[74] MacDonagh, States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1790–1980 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 35–36.

[75] J. S. Mill, England and Ireland (London, 1868), 12–13, quoted in Moody, Davitt and the Irish Revolution , 38.

[76] Padraic Colum, "Concerning a Creamery," Dana 7 (November 1904): 205–8.

ing of mutual aid," or what Mill calls "the moral sentiments of the people." This felt sense of a usufructual right to joint tenancy, this disposition toward mutual aid, and the belief that even the chief leader is no less a member of the association (his supremacy on loan from the group, for the sake of the group) were just what gave the INTS "its individual character" for many of the members; it was the meaning of their collective productions, an aspect of Ireland's "subterranean challenge to the formally dominant theory of property" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[77] The political economy of the INTS was an experiment in the establishment of an Irish state, one that was traditional rather than modern, communal rather than individualist, egalitarian rather than hierarchical, and democratic rather than autocratic, in a wholesale Gaelic alternative to contemporary Britain.

In this struggle, Yeats acted decisively and successfully to repeat and restore the colonial ascendancy of the Anglo-Irish. With the assistance of an antinationalist English woman, who enjoyed complete power of purse, in effect he established a Home Rule government under Protestant leadership, dedicated to enforcing respect for "the obligations of contract" and acknowledgment of the untrammelled freedom of the executive. Under the colors of art, the executive shaped the social character of Ireland, so that it produced works, and produced them in a fashion, basically acceptable to Anglo-Irish landlords and English customers. That this is the narrowest estimate of the "Literary Revival," and by no means a sufficient one, does not make it the less fitting as one judgment of the Abbey enterprise.

8

Clearly, Yeats did more "for his country" than "produce good art."^[78] But one may wish to distinguish the man from the artist: on one hand, in his capacity as an artist, one might say that he could only produce art, good or bad; in his capacity as

[77] MacDonagh, States of Mind , 39.

[78] Greene and Stephens, Synge , 173.

a man, on the other hand, he could produce many other things—journalism, joint stock companies, charters for the National League—that also affected the country's future. Walter Benjamin observes that one cannot fix the political tendency of writers by their social class, by their behavior in matters of public politics, or even by the doctrine in their works of art, since left-wing doctrine, for example, is easily assimilated by capitalist methods of distribution and sold as an object of enjoyment, novel sensations in a stream of sensations.^[79] Benjamin prefers to analyze artists' positions with respect to the social relations of production and their works' positions with respect to these relations. As a man, Yeats may have been deeply affiliated to British capital, committed to the subordination of workers, and even alert to a chance for the reascendancy of the Protestant class in Ireland. But there is the question of the artist: how do his works stand in "the social relations of production"?

According to Benjamin's calculus of literary ethics, a work is good insofar as it puts "an improved apparatus" at the disposal of a multitude of consumers who are encouraged by it to become producers. The more readers become collaborators, the better the work. In fact, even by this radical standard, Yeats's dramas were often "politically correct." His restless invention of dramatic forms and exploration of new territories of Ireland's people and past put before the Irish the shapes in which their national life might be expressed. He showed how folk stories could be made into folk dramas (The Pot of Broth ), how the tradition of "rebel songs" could be turned into propaganda plays (Cathleen ni Houlihan ), how periods of Irish history before the arrival of the English could be used as a source of purely Irish drama (The King's Threshold ), how Irish stage characters could be made to speak in realistic, poetic, and non-comic idioms (Cathleen ni Houlihan, Countess Cathleen ), and how the saga cycles of the Red Branch could bring forth

[79] Benjamin, "The Artist as Producer," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader , ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (1937; rpt., New York: Urizen, 1978), 254–69.

relevant examples of Irish majesty and heroism (Deirdre, On Baile's Strand ). Although a close analysis of several of these works would reveal a doctrine quite hostile to some ideas dear to some nationalists—such as egalitarianism, democracy, Catholicism, and communitarianism—the doctrine is not what matters. It is obvious that his plays caused a number of those who had been spectators to become authors. James Cousins, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, Seamus O'Sullivan, Maud Gonne, and many others made use of "the improved apparatus" Yeats put in their hands. In many ways, Yeats the artist was an innovator and therefore a liberator, even if Yeats the man was not.

9

In the various conflicts between nationalism and art, many of those who saw their way to becoming playwrights by a study of Yeats's plays were shut out of the Abbey Theatre and forced to take their plays to hastily assembled casts for occasional performances in hired halls. It might well be argued that the world lost no great playwrights in Cousins, Ryan, Seamus O'Sullivan, or even Colum; that, indeed, Yeats stood up for the interests of "good art" even when the backstage door was closed to these young writers. But what was the "good art" for which he stood? George Moore, interviewed at the time of his removal to England, was asked how he could leave Ireland when the Irish renaissance was going on. Moore replied that there was no renaissance; there was only J. M. Synge and his few, short, brilliant plays.^[80] With his blunt judgment, generations of readers have concurred: neither the plays of Yeats (at least the pre-Noh plays) and Lady Gregory nor those of any other Abbey playwright until O'Casey in the 1920s reach the standard set by Synge. If only works of the quality of Synge's best dramas were to be played, the Abbey Theatre

[80] "Mr. George Moore on Dublin," Dublin Evening Mail , 6 December 1905, 3; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:55.

would have opened its doors only a few evenings a year, and then to small audiences. The grounds on which plays were judged worthy of production, as a practical matter, could not strictly be whether or not they were great works of drama.

It is clear from the case of William Boyle's fortunes with the Abbey that the working definition of "good art" was broader than "art of high literary merit and permanent interest" and narrower than "art of sound construction, current interest, and general popularity." Boyle's first play, The Building Fund , was an extremely popular satire of small-town types of the Irish Midlands. When Boyle submitted a second play, The Eloquent Dempsy , in August, 1905, he had the strong support of W. G. Fay, who saw a great acting opportunity in the "miles gloriosus" figure of the boastful, double-talking political poltroon Dempsy. Yeats, however, thought the play "impossibly vulgar in its present form," and wrote to Synge asking his help in preventing the play's acceptance by the reading committee (abolished a few months later, in the fall 1905 revision of the constitution).^[81] He impressed upon Synge the seriousness of the issue, since Horniman had spent £4,000 on the Abbey on the condition that they "keep up the standard" of artistic quality. At present, the poet went on, they were at great risk of offending her taste and losing her money, but "when the revision of the constitution is through those of us in the know will be in authority." It is doubtful that Yeats really feared Horniman's disapproval. She objected to many things at the Abbey—from George Moore's presence at rehearsals to sixpenny seats—but not to Boyle or his plays (more "virile," she thought, than those of Yeats and Synge); indeed, these plays were part of the cargo she wished to salvage from the Abbey shipwreck for her Manchester theatre in 1906.^[82] Regarding The Eloquent Dempsy , as on other occa-

[81] WBY to Synge, 15 August [1905] (TCD); Saddlemyer, 74–76.

[82] On 13 July 1906 Horniman advised Yeats that if "Dublin efforts lead to nothing," she meant to offer Boyle help getting his plays produced in Manchester (Hogan and Kilroy, 3:73–74); she found "a certain virility" in his work "which is missing in Yeats and Synge work [sic ]" (Horniman to Yeats, 10 December 1906; Hogan and Kilroy, 3:89).

sions, Yeats used Horniman's money to give authority to his own taste.

In order to define the Abbey conception of "good art," it is necessary to discriminate between two kinds of taste: the delicate palate of Yeats and the larger appetites of the Abbey audience. To the audience, Synge was vulgar, and Boyle was "fair"; to Yeats, Boyle was vulgar, and Synge—more than fair—was the perfection of art. Many explanations have been given for why the satire of one was felt by the audience as pleasant, and that of the other as painful and intolerable. Holloway went home after a performance of Boyle's Building Fund to record in his diary one view of the difference between Boyle's truth and Synge's beauty:

Every word [of The Building Fund ] rang true, and though the dramatist chose his types from most unsympathetic and unlovable specimens of our fellow-countrymen, there was no denying their truth to life. . . . The great literary quality of Mr. Synge's work cannot be denied, and as literature must rank immeasurably above Mr. Boyle's homely, real, flesh and blood talk; but nevertheless, there is no denying that much of his work rings false to Irish ears.^[83]

—a view William M. Murphy perhaps rightly translates to mean that Boyle told the right truths, Synge the wrong truths:

Boyle's characters were slippery politicians and glib funny men committing venial sins. If they pocketed a dubious shilling here or there, broke an oppressive law or two, or confused people with doubletalk, they were merely displaying the charming weaknesses of the lovable Irish. Synge, on the other hand, showed Irishmen as not always faithful to their marriage vows and occasionally as anticlerical, Irish ladies as untouchable in theory but not in fact.^[84]

According to W. G. Fay, the popularity of Boyle's satire had nothing to do with its critique of Irish life, true or not; Boyle's works "played well"—that is, offered good parts, strong curtains, vivid stage "business"—establishing "a fellowship with

[83] Holloway, 25 April 1905.

[84] Murphy, Prodigal Father , 288–89.

the audience."^[85] Yeats's explanation can be seen as a refinement of Fay's: he thought Boyle's work went over well because his plots and characters were the old standbys of nineteenth-century Irish novels and the popular stage (miserly women, rakish sons, grasping priests; plots based on wills and mistaken identities); Boyle was popular, by this logic, just to the degree that he was unoriginal; indeed, it was a Yeats adage that the Muse whispers only to the outcast: "The more they cry against you, the more I love you."^[86] Boyle often claimed Yeats hated his work simply because the audience liked it better than his own;^[87] or did they like it because Yeats hated it, conflicts of taste echoing class war? Certainly some loved Boyle as one of their own, not part of the Protestant clique running the Abbey. But Robert Hogan and James Kilroy offer the most interesting explanation: they find the reason for the audience's distinction of Boyle's satire from Synge's to be that Boyle's "easily apprehensible realistic dialogue aroused laughter and the rich embroidery of Synge's difficult language did not so much arouse laughter as demand admiration."^[88] Synge's style, and Yeats's too, advanced imposing claims to greatness and demanded that such claims be recognized.^[89] An

[85] Fay and Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre , 173; Saddlemyer, 74–75; for a fuller discussion of the Fays' preference for "theatrical theatre," see Flannery, Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre , 185–90.

[86] WBY, Samhain: 1905; rpt. in Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 184; WBY to John Quinn, 4 October 1907; Wade, 495: The people "never minded Boyle, whose people are a sordid lot, because they knew what he was at. They understood his obvious moral." The sentence about the Muse is taken from Samhain: 1904; rpt. in Explorations , 163.

[87] Boyle's hatred of Yeats was obsessive; every letter to Holloway mixes rage with ridicule of the INTS, Ltd. directorate, as in this 2 February 1910 assault: "If the Directors wanted another play from me, do you fancy they wouldn't ask for it? As long as [Yeats and Lady Gregory] have money enough to run unpopular pieces they'll continue running them. When the fund runs out, they'll chuck the show. 'The advancement of drama' means to them their own drama" (Holloway Manuscript, ms. 13267–69 [2], NLI).

[88] Hogan and Kilroy, 3:54–55.

[89] As Conor Cruise O'Brien suggested in conversation (24 April 1988), the Abbey directorate imagined the theatre as a sort of school through which Protestant author/teachers could fulfill a proselytizing mission to their Catholic middle-class spectator/students, teaching them to admire works of highculture. It is true that the plays on the Abbey syllabus were better literature than what the audience would itself have chosen as entertainment, and that the directors had better taste than spectators without their advantages of higher education and broad reading, but the audience nonetheless resented the pedagogical presumptuousness of the INTS management, and of the literary style itself.

audience attempting to struggle free of ancient habits of subservience was not disposed to grant such peremptory, authoritarian claims in the style; moreover, an audience that had given the price of admission for two hours' oblivion of fabled laughter or tears felt cheated if forced to ponder an ostentation of idiosyncratic intellect.

To collate these extracts, we can say that, according to the taste of the audience, good drama is drama that entertains the audience, invites them to a full understanding, and reflects with some (but not too much) truth the qualities of their lives, but accommodates itself to the patterns of their popular fictions. But none of these things is necessary to good drama, at least according to Yeats's taste. For him, good drama may be obscure, unpopular, even painful to watch; what it must be is drama of egregious literary quality. Conrad says that a good novel must carry its justification in every line; for Yeats, a good play must show its literary ambition in every phrase. His first principle is that "our plays must be literature"; his second, third, and fourth, that they should be little else but literature. He would put the actors in barrels, model their gestures after marble statues, allow the scene-painter shades of but one color, jealous of anything more theatrical than the language itself, which, next to that dullness, should seem, he hoped, extravagant, fantastic, and noble.^[90] The suppression of "common life" was the condition for the expression of literature; the theatre was to be a mirror of reverie, not reality—reality had to be "checked":

In all drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the speech of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the rapidity of the dialogue. . . . The dignity of Greek

[90] WBY, "The Play, the Player, and the Scene," Samhain: 1904; rpt. in Explorations , 164–79, esp. 170.

drama, and in a lesser degree of that of Corneille and Racine, depends, as contrasted with the troubled life of Shakespearian drama, on an almost even speed of dialogue, and on a so continuous exclusion of the animation of common life that thought remains lofty and language rich.^[91]

Yeats sought this "check" in versified dialogue, choric speaking, and ritualistic movement; Synge found it in the "long and meditative" cadence of dialect, an elaborately decorative screen rather than a window of words, for the audience to look at, rather than see through. Yeats admires the fact that this cadenced dialect "makes the clash of wills among his persons indirect and dreamy, it helps him . . . to preserve the integrity of art in an age of reasons and purposes."^[92] Surely it is true that from Synge's plays we do not remember most clearly characters, situations, or human problems; instead, we recollect first the filter of "fine language" through which all these dramatic elements make their impression. Great plays may be written according to Yeats's definition of good drama (it is a feat, but Synge proved that it can be done); however, drama so relentlessly literary, so deeply at war with its own materials, can never make up more than a small portion of the best works of the living theatre.

A form of drama that compels the audience to admire the playwright is not just "authorial" drama, but autocratic drama. The audience is forced to admit, or outright to reject, the privilege of the author's point of view and his right not just to show life but to make it after his own will. The genius of Yeats is magisterial, and his highest love is for the art of other magisterial geniuses—for Blake, Nietzsche, Synge, and Pound. Talents less noble, those of another kind, tend to draw his contempt. Æ, taking Yeats up on his rough treatment of Marie nic Shiublaigh, went on to treat him to a full-dress lecture on the intolerant, authoritarian bent in his nature, connecting his style of writing with his style of leadership:

[91] WBY, "John Synge and the Ireland of His Time," in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 333–34.

[92] WBY, "The Well of the Saints," in Essays and Introductions , 300.

There is probably not one of the younger people of whom you have not said some stinging and contemptuous remark. They may have been justified. But if you wish to lead a movement you can only do so by silence on points which irritate you or by kindly suggestions to the people. A man without followers can do nothing and you have few or no friends in Dublin. . . . You are committing the great mistake of so many people about Ireland "the twenty years of resolute government" theory. Irish people will only be led by their affections. . . . Compare Hyde's power with your own and you have twenty times his ability. Fall out of their circle of affections and they will turn on you like Healy o[n] Parnell. You may lose all your present actors who are not paid, as they will probably meet continually the young men in the clubs who will say you are confessedly not a Nationalist, and if a new company was formed it would get all the old group of actors except the two Fays, Miss Allgood and Wright. You who initiated the theatre movement in Ireland will be out of it. . . . You will be as out of everything in Ireland as Dowden & with as little influence. . . . There have been greater artists in literature than yourself but it is not always recorded that their position impelled them to speak contemptuously of everyone not their equal. The fact is the position you wish to hold of general autocrat in literary, dramatic and artistic matters in Dublin or Ireland is a position accorded through love and cannot be assumed without a press to back you up.^[93]

Æ rarely wrote better than when writing of his best friend's faults; he had a fatherly way of putting "the soul in uncomfortable places."^[94] Yeats in response could choose between being demolished as a person, and being utterly unmoved, above the attack. His answer, an unrepentant page from Nietzsche, has a graceful superiority:

I desire the love of a very few people, my equals or superiors. The love of the rest would be a bond and an intrusion. These others will in time come to know that I am a strong and capable man and that I have gathered the strong and capable about me. . . . The antagonism, which is sometimes between you and me, comes from the fact that though you are strong

[93] Æ to WBY [late December? 1905]; Finneran, Harper, and Murphy, 1:151–55.

[94] WBY to Æ, 19 September [1905] (NLI); Kuch, Yeats and AE , 225.

and capable yourself you gather the weak and not very capable about you, and that I feel they are a danger to all good work. It is I think because you desire love. Besides you have the religious genius to which all souls are equal. In all work except that of salvation that spirit is a hindrance.^[95]

The friendship of Yeats and Æ could not bear this degree of plain-speaking; the exchange of letters was their last for many years.^[96] From it, we can see not only that others felt Yeats to be imperious and domineering, but also that he embraced that description. Both his high standards and his particular taste for literature with qualities of power put him into constant conflict with his actors and audience, and drove him to seek dominion in that conflict. One of Yeats's sayings that Lady Gregory preserved gives this lordliness marmoreal expression:

In questions of taste, it's no good to use argument, one must use force.^[97]

10

Once Yeats succeeded in colonizing the Abbey, a dialectic between repression and domination came into play.^[98] Aspirations on the part of the Irish to national self-expression were repressed by the rule of "no politics" and the practice of wage labor; on the other hand, the consciousness of the people was dominated by a conception of theatre as a grace of cultivated society and an expression of individual, as opposed to social, will.

The dominating and repressive effects of a narrow definition of "good art" can be illustrated by an analysis of The

[95] WBY to Æ [8 January 1906]; Wade, 466.

[96] For a fuller account of the quarrel between Yeats and Æ, and their reconciliation, see Kuch, Yeats and A.E. 225–38.

[97] Lady Gregory, Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory , ed. Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1973), 351.

[98] For a fuller account of the distinction between domination and repression, see Smart, Foucault, Marxism, and Critique , 81. The roots of Foucault's theory of repression are in Reich, those of his theory of domination in Nietzsche.

Shadowy Waters , first performed on 4 January 1904. Yeats had worked on various scripts of this play since his youth: it is doubtless deeply entangled in his ways of conceiving the world, so deeply that it was difficult for him to articulate his intention in a way that would be understood, even by his friends.^[99] But he nonetheless soldiered on, finally making a stage version, partly in prose, which he mounted on 8 December 1906 with the greatest care for lighting, costume, and vocal delivery. Though Yeats was right enough when he wrote Frank Fay that a drama like The Shadowy Waters would "prove itself the worst sort possible for our theatre,"^[100] during the struggle for control of the Abbey, he regained interest in the play, trying to remake it into something "strong" and "simple."^[101] It represents one attempt to embody his dream of an Irish "Theatre of Beauty."

In all versions, the story centers on a romantic and mystical pirate, Forgael, who has set his ship's course to the north, steering by the voices of human-headed birds that give him messages, much to the fear and discontent of his crew, who are only interested in a happy outlaw life of booty and stolen brides. Immortal, insatiable longings have come upon Forgael; he won't

Be satisfied to live like other men,
And drive impossible dreams away,^[102]

[99] See George Moore's hilarious account of his attempts to help Yeats chisel away a few poetical passages from The Shadowy Waters , which ended with Moore finding himself "inside a prison-house with all the doors locked and windows barred." To Moore, the thought in the play is like a carriage wheel spinning off the ground: it works beautifully, but goes nowhere (Moore, Hail and Farewell! vol. 1, 1911; Ave [London: Heinemann, 1937], 186–87). David R. Clark's early essay, "W. B. Yeats: The Shadowy Waters (MS. Version): 'Half the Characters Had Eagles' Faces'" still provides the best brief, sympathetic account of the play's origins, phases, and intentions (Irish Renaissance: A Gathering of Essays, Memoirs, and Letters from "The Massachusetts Review," ed. Robin Skelton and David R. Clark [Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1965], 26–55).

[100] WBY to F. Fay, ?20 January 1904; Wade, 424.

[101] See for instance WBY's 15 July 1905 letter to Florence Farr (Wade, 453).

[102] Alspach, 321; lines 103–4.

as his friend Aibric counsels. Forgael is sure that

What the world's million lips are thirsting for,
Must be substantial somewhere.^[103]

They come upon a merchant galley, massacre its crew, and capture Queen Dectora after killing her husband. Dectora is forced by spells, shed from the strings of a harp made of apple wood, into a love for Forgael so overwhelming that she consents to follow him in his quest for the ultimate kingdom of Love in realms beyond the Pole—beyond mortal life. After Forgael recovers from his distress that Dectora casts a shadow (he was hoping for an immortal, disembodied beauty), and his guilt over drugging her with his Druid crafts, the rope is cut that has tied them to the now mutinous crew, and the pirate captain and his love set off alone into magical seas.

On the one hand, the play is full of symbols of primarily personal significance to the poet, and Yeats was happy to let people know that more was meant than would be understood—something was "kept back . . . for instructed eyes."^[104] On the other hand, the play is basically an allegory of the rejection of the pursuit of wealth for the pursuit of values beyond those of the exchange—beauty, knowledge, love, and so on—though it is not clear whether Love is one of those values, or a way of finding them. In fact, interesting questions arise for Forgael as to whether the queen is that for which he thirsts, a means to finding the goal of life, or a possible distraction for it. In its origins, the play is very much the troubled fantasy of a young man who has not yet found happiness with a woman ("The play . . . came into existence," Yeats explained to Florence Farr, "after years of strained emotion, of living upon tip-toe"),^[105] but in its extensive later development it became a screen on which Yeats projected interests of a technical, mystical, and, I would argue, political kind.

[103] Alspach, 322; lines 122–23.

[104] WBY to John Quinn, 16 September 1905; Wade, 462.

[105] WBY to Florence Farr [? July 1905]; Wade, 454.

One might hypothetically subject all the ostensible meanings of The Shadowy Waters , both personal and allegorical, to a sociological revision. It is certainly important that the hero be rich, but not committed to riches; that he be outside the law, indeed, above it. It is even important that the captain of the pirate ship is a lonely man under the threat of mutiny from his men (who have in common only the pursuit of gain), because if the ship is construed as Ireland, the loneliness of the captain would be the loneliness of the Protestant. The Protestant—soldier, buck, and planter—is a sort of pirate: someone who has taken a voyage across the Irish channel for the sake of booty. The handsome thing about the pirate is that he romanticizes illegality. When debates in Parliament dwelt upon the forms of legal justification for the booty of Protestants, Yeats produced a play that adds glamor to lawlessness. The pirate is both a revelation and criticism of the merchants upon whom he preys. Both are engaged in the transportation of wealth from the small to the strong, though merchants do it in the name of a nation, the pirate for the sake of denationalized outlaws. By attacking the legal system of expropriation, the pirate can become a hero to common people, as the merchant never can.

Perhaps Forgael is not an analogue to the Irish Protestant; perhaps he is no more than Axel on a boat; one is eager nonetheless to construe significance where so much is suggested and so little is spelled out, and it would be a familiar surprise if this most aesthetic of playlets were a dark design of unconscious propaganda, an occult transfiguration of class conflict. But however the play is read, it must be conceived as in some sort a celebration of exalted individuality, Alastor at the Abbey. While The Shadowy Waters may have been just the ticket for a 1905 Convention of London Theosophists,^[106] to those Irishmen who paid to see it performed in 1906, the whole conception was an impertinence. They had come because it was on the

[106] "The first version of 'The Shadowy Waters' was performed at the Court Theatre, London, for a Theosophical Convention on July 8" (Wade, 451).

stage of the Abbey Theatre that the emergent life of Ireland was to be enacted, only to find that space had been taken up by a prospectively beautiful, but to them incomprehensible, piece of poetic self-indulgence. Forms of social life were announcing themselves in which the individual as one who lives for love, who creates exquisite values beyond the exchange, who sails to uncharted seas, who acts alone outside the law, would be more and more impossible. To speak of the individual's harmony, culture, and ideal aspirations was to base one's hopes on an idea of man as he had existed in the past. The task for the Irish people was not to harmonize the isolated individual, but to realize the nation as a whole. The Shadowy Waters is in its way another triumph by Yeats, of a piece with his victories as president of the Irish National Theatre Society: it is an instance of the repression of explicit politics and the dominance of the implicit politics of beauty. In The Shadowy Waters , big business and high culture take the stage in place of national theatre.