The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama

W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge

George Cusack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135855970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study examines the early dramatic works of Yeats, Synge, and Gregory in the context of late colonial Ireland's unique socio-political landscape. By contextualizing each author's work within the artistic and political discourses of their time, Cusack demonstrates the complex negotiation of nationalism, class, and gender identities undertaken by these three authors in the years leading up to Ireland's revolution against England. Furthermore, by focusing on plays written by each author in the context of the ongoing debates over Irish national identity that were taking place throughout Irish public life in this period, Cusack examines in more depth than previous studies the ways Yeats, Gregory, and Synge adapted conventional dramatic and linguistic forms to accommodate the conflicting claims of Irish nationalism. In so doing, he demonstrates the contribution these authors made not only to the development of Irish nationalism but also to modern and postcolonial literature as we understand them today.

1
Kathleen ni Houlihan and the Perception of Propaganda

When the newly constructed Abbey Theatre applied for its first patent in 1904, Yeats warned his advocate, Horace Plunkett, that the author’s association with Kathleen ni Houlihan “may perhaps raise a difficulty” for the theatre’s relationship with Dublin Castle because, although the play had been “a great success” for the Theatre, “It may be said that it is a political play of a propagandist kind” (Letters III; 622–3).¹ In the same letter, Yeats goes on to assure Plunkett that these hypothetical allegations would be completely unfounded: “I have never written a play to advocate any kind of opinion, and I think such a play would necessarily be bad art, or at any rate a very humble kind of art. At the same time, I feel that I have no right to exclude for myself or for others, any of the passionate material of drama” (ibid 623). This combined warning and justification perfectly encapsulates Yeats’s mixed emotions about Kathleen and the nationalist community that, to his mind, was responsible for its reputation. By acknowledging the “passionate material” of his plays, which in this case includes an apparent endorsement of military revolution in Ireland, Yeats suggests that the nationalist audience’s emotional response to Kathleen ni Houlihan was elicited by design. Yet, at the same time, he immediately chafes at the notion that his work, and by extension its author and his theatre, might be associated with any concrete political agenda on the basis of that response.

This was not the first time Yeats had attempted to promote the nationalistic sentiments of his drama while denying any political agenda his audience might associate with those sentiments. The definition of national theatre that Yeats and his compatriots had championed since the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1898 frequently required the author to make two seemingly contradictory claims with regard to his own work and the work of the theatre in general. According to its establishing manifesto, the purpose of the National Theatre movement was “to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland,” a statement which implies that, for the Theatre to be successful, the audience needed to recognize some element of the Irish national character within each play. However, as the above-quoted assertion that Yeats had “never written a play to advocate any kind of opinion” illustrates, Yeats insisted throughout his dramatic career that the Theatre represented a nationality of ideas and sentiments, not actions.

Consequently, Yeats maintained a troubled relationship with Kathleen for the rest of his life. On one hand, the play became a mainstay of the Theatre’s repertoire, and Yeats continued to take obvious pride in his status as “the author of Kathleen ni Houlihan,” even though, as I demonstrate below, that title was not entirely deserved.² On the other hand, Yeats never shed his discomfort with the play’s propagandistic reputation, a fact most famously illustrated by the ubiquitous question in his 1930s poem “Man and Echo”: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?” (Collected Poems 345; ls. 11–12).

Egotistical as it may sound, that question was a valid one. Kathleen ni Houlihan was perhaps the greatest popular success achieved by the National Theatre in any of its incarnations, and the evidence suggests that its success stemmed directly from audiences’ perception of the play as revolutionary propaganda. In this regard, two of the most often cited assessments of the play come from Steven Gwynn and Lennox Robinson: Gwynn walked away from the first performance wondering “whether such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people to go out and shoot or be shot,” while Robinson, reflecting on a long career as director for the Abbey, suggested that Kathleen, along with Lady Gregory’s The Rising of the Moon, “made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a hundred reasoned books” (Grene 69–70). Whether or not the play actually “sent out” any young men who might otherwise have remained safe at home, its association with rebellion was obviously both immediate and long lasting.

Nonetheless, Yeats’s concern that his association with Kathleen ni Houlihan tied himself and his theatre inextricably to revolutionary nationalism and its manifestation in 1916 is less well founded. One week after the opening run, Arthur Griffith was willing to declare Yeats a kindred spirit in the pages of The United Irishman: “We agree with Yeats that nothing save a victory on the battlefield could so strengthen the National spirit as the creation of an Irish Theatre” (Cullingford 52). But a mere sixteen months later, when the National Theatre staged Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen, Griffith quickly reversed his opinion of Yeats, the Theatre, and their politics: “This talk of ‘politics’ when Irish Nationalism is meant—this assurance that a Theatre intended to be a free and National Theatre has no propaganda save that of good art—savors to us of consideration for the feelings of the servants of the Englishmen who are among us” (Hogan and Kilroy 80). Griffith’s latter statement does not merely question the Theatre’s commitment to Irish nationalism in the context of Synge’s play, it entirely dismisses the apolitical ideology of the Theatre that Yeats and the other directors had maintained from the beginning and accuses the directors of promoting an equivocal form of nationalism that is actually a covert endorsement of unionism.

Griffith’s change of opinion illustrates that, although Kathleen ni Houlihan retained the admiration of the more militant elements of the nationalist community in Ireland, the National Theatre as an institution lost that admiration quickly and perhaps more thoroughly than its directors wished. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, the discontinuity between the popular perception of the play and the perception of its authors and their politics arose less from the play itself than from the circumstances of its first productions. In its various printed forms, Kathleen ni Houlihan provides a distinctly ambivalent meditation on nationalist iconography and the violence it can inspire. Furthermore, in keeping with the ideology established by the Irish Literary Theatre, the play depicts Irish identity as a spiritual bond rather than an ethnic category or geographic location, and it dismisses military action as a superfluous and potentially tragic manifestation of that bond. But in the inaugural performances of April and October, 1902, Kathleen ni Houlihan appeared to audiences sponsored by two different nationalist societies and with its dialogue and action reinterpreted according to the personal agendas of the director, the producers, and the cast. Consequently, the play that audiences saw had been retooled to affirm the ideology of revolutionary nationalism rather than to refute it.

Examining the production history of Kathleen ni Houlihan, therefore, provides us with a case study in the way a modernist text could be transformed by the social forces inherent in public performance. At stake in the debate over the play’s meaning were the very definitions and goals of nationalism. As I discussed in the introduction to this book, Yeats and Gregory addressed the contradiction between the backward-looking tendency of nationalism and forward-looking nature of modernism by using of the same tactic that would later be deployed by the expatriate American authors of the English Vorticist movement: they offered a model of national identity that was necessarily open-ended. The Irishness of Kathleen ni Houlihan manifests itself not through the deployment of shared historical memories and cultural symbols per se but through the act of questioning those memories and symbols in the present. Thus, the ambivalence that runs through the play is not merely a by-product of the authors’ conflicted political ideology but an integral part of their understanding of Irish identity. In its written form, the play calls its audience together to examine the 1798 rebellion, not to endorse it, and by leaving the emotional impact of Michael’s departure unclear, Yeats and Gregory suggest that the national identity evoked by the Old Woman remains under scrutiny as the play closes. The authors thus serve as the audience’s proxy by searching for a moment in Ireland’s revolutionary past that will clearly identify the goals, duties, and direction of the current nationalist movement. At the play’s conclusion, however, the lessons that can be gleaned from the past remain ambiguous at best, implying that the Irish of the present must find their way by rethinking the actions of previous generations rather than simply recalling them. Such a formulation holds an obvious attraction for artistic movements such as the National Theatre. By defining national identity as something that emerges only through constant interrogation and reinterpretation, Yeats and Gregory establish the need for the Theatre as a performative space where such interrogation can occur and the need for authors and artists like themselves who can do the interrogating.

However, for the majority of Kathleen’s audience and production staff, at least at the first two performances, Irish nationalism was a much more clearly defined and closed-ended ideology. As I discussed in the introduction, the confederation of movements and societies that came together in Ireland under the banner of “cultural nationalism” were never a monolithic entity with a consistent ideology, methodology, or objective. For the purposes of this analysis, though, we can establish a general distinction between the ideology of nationalism favored by the National Theatre’s directors, which I described above, and its most significant counterpart, which for the purposes of this chapter I will refer to as Gaelic nationalism. The latter category encompasses a range of goals and intentions but hinges on the idea that the best way to create an independent national identity for Ireland was to strip away as many of the English elements as possible from Irish culture. For moderates like Douglas Hyde, Gaelic nationalism represented a primarily cultural and political project of restoring Irish civilization to its precolonial glory.³ In the more radical hands of Padraic Pearse, the vision of a restored Ireland was sharpened into a rhetoric of racial purity that can at times make the modern reader cringe and could only be realized through a full-fledged military revolution.⁴

In all of its manifestations, though, Gaelic nationalism rested on a set of clear and material goals, the most immediate of which were the dismantling of British colonial authority and the establishment of some form of independent Irish state. These goals necessitated a certain amount of negotiation between the collective past of the Irish people and their present, but they also required that these negotiations have a definite resolution that could be used to define the borders, both real and symbolic, between Ireland and the rest of the world. This need led to several key changes in the performance of Kathleen ni Houlihan that provide ready answers for some of Yeats and Gregory’s more pressing questions about the necessity and efficacy of revolutionary violence. It also created an audience who was more likely to accept those answers at face value and overlook the discomfort towards that very response that the authors embedded in the play.

Despite their ideological differences, there were very practical reasons for the National Theatre movement to reach out to the more radical elements of the Gaelic nationalist community in 1902. The Irish Literary Theatre folded in 1901, after only three seasons, due in large part to the fact that Yeats, Gregory, and Martyn were unable to secure Irish actors for their plays, and thus the audience quickly lost interest. Consequently, by 1902 the directors badly needed both logistical and financial support to keep their movement alive. To secure this, Yeats sought help from the same nationalist societies he would soon repudiate, and Kathleen ni Houlihan was the result. The play was produced twice in that year: in April under the auspices of Maud Gonne’s Inghinidhe na hEireann (the Daughters of Erin) and in October as part of the Samhain festival sponsored by Arthur Griffith’s Cumann na nGaedheal (the Irish Party). Both productions were directed by William Fay and performed by members of Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company, except for the title role, which was played on both occasions by Gonne herself. Thus, unlike all previous and subsequent productions of Yeats’s and Gregory’s plays, Kathleen ni Houlihan premiered as a collaborative effort by multiple “national” organizations, a fact that made an enormous impact on both the practical and symbolic significance of the play to its first audiences.

AUTHORSHIP AND AMBIVALENCE IN THE WRITTEN TEXT

Tracing the impact of the inaugural performances on the popular interpretation of the play sheds new light on the old question of who wrote Kathleen ni Houlihan. Although publicly the play was attributed exclusively to Yeats from 1902 onward, scholars over the last thirty years have placed Yeats’s exclusive authorship increasingly under scrutiny, and it is now generally agreed that Yeats and Gregory wrote the script collaboratively. James Pethica provides the most substantial evidence for this assessment, observing that Gregory’s manuscript notes identify the first ten pages of the script as “mine alone,” and that William Fay credited Gregory with the entire play “except the part of ‘Cathleen’” (210, 212). More recently, Grene has identified characteristic elements of both Yeats’s and Gregory’s dramatic styles throughout Kathleen, suggesting that the authors worked in tandem throughout the writing process.⁵ However, even if we accept the most conservative assessments of this collaboration, such as Antony Coleman’s suggestion that Gregory merely provided Yeats with “instruction in the vocabulary and rhythms of country speech” (136), Gregory’s contribution is still too substantial too ignore, for as I demonstrate below, Kathleen ni Houlihan is a play about speech. The Old Woman’s ability to inspire young men to sacrifice themselves for their nation depends on her ability to manipulate the rhythms of country speech, and thus much of the play’s power stems from its authors’ ability to do the same.

To some extent, though, these attempts to divide the text of the play with absolute precision between Yeats and Gregory have masked the more complex aspects of the play’s authorship. Many critics have noted the contributions of Maud Gonne, Arthur Griffith, and Frank and William Fay to the play’s production and reception, but until now these have largely been dismissed as incidental to the final product. I believe that this oversight stems from the fact that most of the scholarship written about Kathleen ni Houlihan focuses on the play’s script rather than its production. But to truly understand this play as both a literary work and a theatrical phenomenon, we must attempt to see the play as its original audience saw it, and this requires us to examine the original productions alongside the script. The picture that emerges from this analysis reveals a play sharply divided between the moderate and often ambivalent cultural nationalism envisioned by Yeats and Gregory and the revolutionary imagination shared by Griffith, Fay, Gonne, an...

Table of contents

• Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Kathleen ni Houlihan and the Perception of Propaganda
• 2 Yeats
• 3 Gregory
• 4 Synge
• 5 The Playboy of the Western World and the End of Artistic Nationalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index