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The lasting effect of Horniman's schemes at the Abbey shows itself in one of Lady Gregory's best plays, Dervorgilla , first produced on 31 October 1907, but composed (she recollects) "at a time when circumstances had forced us to accept an English stage-manager" and when she sought to move Yeats "from the path of expediency."^[135] The secret politics of the business displays itself in the legendary drama, but only as closely knotted needlework appears, verso , in the rich illusion of a tapestry.

In Irish folk history, Dervorgilla bears the responsibility of bringing the curse of English rule upon Ireland. The wife of O'Rourke, king of Breffny, she ran away with her lover Diarmuid, king of Leinster, who consequently made a bargain with Norman warriors to defend him against the wrath of O'Rourke in exchange for property in Ireland, the foothold of their future ascendancy. Lady Gregory sets her play at a date in the old age of Dervorgilla, who has retired in remorse to a monastic life behind walls. Only two loyal family retainers—Mona and her husband Flann—know the secret of her identity. Dervorgilla emerges from her solitude at the beginning of the play to dispense money to the poor and prizes to young people for their sports, in the hope of one day being remembered for good deeds. While she is holding court, a song-maker wanders on the scene seeking to impose on her hospi-

[134] To draw back from the essential sadness of this story and put the situation in larger terms, we can say that the relation of base to superstructure is complex, both enabling and disabling. The economic base of the Abbey does not throw a perfect echo in its superstructure. It does, however, determine the activities of the theatre in two restricted senses of the term: to place limits upon and to attempt to force by will . Mainly, it simply lies under , but not quietly or motionlessly, first to raise up and later to subvert the cultural processes of the superstructure.

[135] Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre , 92–93.

tality. Upon payment by Dervorgilla, he offers her a song: it is, horribly, the tale of the coming of the Gall into Ireland through the wickedness of Dervorgilla. The songmaker, getting no praise for his craft, leaves to play his old tricks for a new crowd: the English soldiers. Dervorgilla worries that he will spread the report of her perfidy across the country, and she permits old Flann to go after him and pay the songmaker to leave Ireland altogether. Only moments later, a young man returns with the news that Flann has been killed by the English for trying to stop the songmaker from telling a story. Dervorgilla is tormented that another has died for her sake. When Mona says that she will not blame Dervorgilla for the death of Flann, any more than for O'Rourke's death or Diarmuid's lechery, she unintentionally gives away the secret of Dervorgilla's identity to the young people gathered around. One by one, during a final long sad speech by Dervorgilla, the boys and girls of Ireland lay down their presents—cups and necklaces, hurley stick and silver ball—at the feet of the queen, and walk away, delivering "the swift, unflinching, terrible judgment of the young."^[136]

Even though the play is connected to aspects of Abbey "theatre business"—poets who sing for pay, the evil of English invasion, the resentment of young Irish nationalists—it is not an allegory: the audience was in no way invited behind the scenes to gain a perspective on that level of reference. Abbey politics are its motive, not its meaning: the play springs from an inchoate feeling of class guilt, the well of Lady Gregory's creativity, as she sought to make reparations through her privilege, wealth, and talent to the Irish nation. Is there a warrant for seeing Lady Gregory dividing her feelings about Yeats into Diarmuid and the Songmaker, the first a young man not her husband, love of whom brought trouble from the English; the second a poet who imposes on the hospitality of a woman, who is always in need of money, who

[136] Lady Gregory, The Collected Plays , ed. Ann Saddlemyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 2:110.

sings for anyone that pays (Irish or English), but who always, nonetheless, sings the truth in songs his country will remember? The answer is on the other side of the curtain; what lies on this side, and can be seen, is that the power of the play's conclusion is its dramatization of the fact that the very privilege that makes it possible to make gifts compromises those gifts and leads to further domination. This bitter awakening to her own guilt, and certainly to the venality of songmaker Yeats, was the fruit of Lady Gregory's association with Horniman. She knew only too intimately that Horniman's "generosity" meant foreign domination at the Abbey. In going along with Horniman, Lady Gregory admitted, she "felt as if [she] should be spoken of some day as one who had betrayed her country's trust." Nothing I say can, however, cheat her of the reward of courage in "seeing and knowing that a deed once done has no undoing": the subornation of the Board of Authors of the Abbey Theatre in the ongoing policy that the National Theatre Society not be national.^[137]

[137] Once Horniman had decisively shifted her capital to the Manchester theatre, Yeats wrote Synge: "There is a remote chance of money coming to us from some other quarter at the end of the patent period and that chance would be much better if we made ourselves a representative Irish institution" (WBY to Synge, 15 August 1907; Saddlemyer, 235). This letter clearly implies that the NTS had not been, had not tried to be, and had not been free to become "a representative Irish institution" while Horniman was involved with it.