Come ride and ride to the garden,Come ride and ride with a will:For the flower comes with the fruit thereBeyond a hill and a hill.RefrainCome ride and ride to the garden,Come ride like the March wind;There’s barley there, and water there,And stabling to your mind.
Come ride and ride to the garden,Come ride and ride with a will:For the flower comes with the fruit thereBeyond a hill and a hill.RefrainCome ride and ride to the garden,Come ride like the March wind;There’s barley there, and water there,And stabling to your mind.
Come ride and ride to the garden,Come ride and ride with a will:For the flower comes with the fruit thereBeyond a hill and a hill.
Come ride and ride to the garden,
Come ride and ride with a will:
For the flower comes with the fruit there
Beyond a hill and a hill.
Refrain
Come ride and ride to the garden,Come ride like the March wind;There’s barley there, and water there,And stabling to your mind.
Come ride and ride to the garden,
Come ride like the March wind;
There’s barley there, and water there,
And stabling to your mind.
Travelling Man:How did you like that ride, little horseman?
Child:Go on again! I want another ride!
Travelling Man(sings)—
The Archangels stand in a row thereAnd all the garden bless,The Archangel Axel, Victor the angelWork at the cider press.RefrainCome ride and ride to the garden, &c.
The Archangels stand in a row thereAnd all the garden bless,The Archangel Axel, Victor the angelWork at the cider press.RefrainCome ride and ride to the garden, &c.
The Archangels stand in a row thereAnd all the garden bless,The Archangel Axel, Victor the angelWork at the cider press.
The Archangels stand in a row there
And all the garden bless,
The Archangel Axel, Victor the angel
Work at the cider press.
Refrain
Come ride and ride to the garden, &c.
Come ride and ride to the garden, &c.
Child:We will soon be at the Golden Mountain now. Ride again. Sing another song.
Travelling Man(sings)—
O scent of the broken apples!O shuffling of holy shoes!Beyond a hill and a hill thereIn the land that no one knows.RefrainCome ride and ride to the garden, &c.
O scent of the broken apples!O shuffling of holy shoes!Beyond a hill and a hill thereIn the land that no one knows.RefrainCome ride and ride to the garden, &c.
O scent of the broken apples!O shuffling of holy shoes!Beyond a hill and a hill thereIn the land that no one knows.
O scent of the broken apples!
O shuffling of holy shoes!
Beyond a hill and a hill there
In the land that no one knows.
Refrain
Come ride and ride to the garden, &c.
Come ride and ride to the garden, &c.
Child:Now another ride.
Travelling Man:This will be the last. It will be a good ride.
(The mother comes in. She stares for a second, then throws down her basket and snatches up the child.)
Mother:Did ever anyone see the like of that! A common beggar, a travelling man off the roads, to be holding the child! To be leaving his ragged arms about him as if he was of his own sort! Get out of that, whoever you are, and quit this house or I’ll call to some that will make you quit it.
Child:Do not send him out! He is not a bad man; he is a good man; he was playing horses with me. He has grand songs.
Mother:Let him get away out of this now, himself and his share of songs. Look at the way he has your bib destroyed that I was after washing in the morning!
Child:He was holding me on the horse. Wewere riding, I might have fallen. He held me.
Mother:I give you my word you are done now with riding horses. Let him go on his road. I have no time to be cleaning the place after the like of him.
Child:He is tired. Let him stop here till evening.
Travelling Man:Let me rest here for a while, I have been travelling a long way.
Mother:Where did you come from to-day?
Travelling Man:I came over Slieve Echtge from Slieve na n-Or. I had no house to stop in. I walked the long bog road, the wind was going through me, there was no shelter to be got, the red mud of the road was heavy on my feet. I got no welcome in the villages, and so I came on to this place, to the rising of the river at Ballylee.
Mother:It is best for you to go on to the town. It is not far for you to go. We will maybe have company coming in here.
(She pours out flour into a bowl and begins mixing.)
Travelling Man:Will you give me a bit of that dough to bring with me? I have gone a long time fasting.
Mother:It is not often in the year I make bread like this. There are a few cold potatoes on the dresser, are they not good enough for you? There is many a one would be glad to get them.
Travelling Man:Whatever you will give me, I will take it.
Mother:(Going to the dresser for the potatoes and looking at the shelves.) What in the earthly world has happened all the delf? Where are the jugs gone and the plates? They were all in it when I went out a while ago.
Child:(Hanging his head.) We were making a garden with them. We were making that garden there in the corner.
Mother:Is that what you were doing after I bidding you to sit still and to keep yourself quiet? It is to tie you in the chair I will another time! My grand jugs! (She picks them up and wipes them.) My plates that I bought the first time I ever went marketing into Gort. The best in the shop they were. (One slips from her hand and breaks.) Look at that now, look what you are after doing.
(She gives a slap at the child.)
Travelling Man:Do not blame the child. It was I myself took them down from the dresser.
Mother:(Turning on him.) It was you took them! What business had you doing that? It’s the last time a tramp or a tinker or a rogue of the roads will have a chance of laying his hand on anything in this house. It is jailed you should be! What did you want touching the dresser at all? Is it looking you were for what you could bring away?
Travelling Man:(Taking the child’s hands.) I would not refuse these hands that were held out for them. If it was for the four winds of the world he had asked, I would have put their bridles into these innocent hands.
Mother:(Taking up the jug and throwing the branch on the floor.) Get out of this! Get out of this I tell you! There is no shelter here for the like of you! Look at that mud on the floor! You are not fit to come into the house of any decent respectable person!
(The room begins to darken.)
Travelling Man:Indeed, I am more used to the roads than to the shelter of houses. It is often I have spent the night on the bare hills.
Mother:No wonder in that! (She begins to sweep floor.) Go out of this now to whatever company you are best used to, whatever they are. The worst of people it is likely they are, thieves and drunkards and shameless women.
Travelling Man:Maybe so. Drunkards and thieves and shameless women, stones that have fallen, that are trodden under foot, bodies that are spoiled with sores, bodies that are worn with fasting, minds that are broken with much sinning, the poor, the mad, the bad....
Mother:Get out with you! Go back to your friends, I say!
Travelling Man:I will go. I will go back tothe high road that is walked by the bare feet of the poor, by the innocent bare feet of children. I will go back to the rocks and the wind, to the cries of the trees in the storm! (He goes out.)
Child:He has forgotten his branch!
(Takes it and follows him.)
Mother:(Still sweeping.) My good plates from the dresser, and dirty red mud on the floor, and the sticks all scattered in every place. (Stoops to pick them up.) Where is the child gone? (Goes to door.) I don’t see him—he couldn’t have gone to the river—it is getting dark—the bank is slippy. Come back! Come back! Where are you? (Child runs in.)
Mother:O where were you? I was in dread it was to the river you were gone, or into the river.
Child:I went after him. He is gone over the river.
Mother:He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t go through the flood.
Child:He did go over it. He was as if walking on the water. There was a light before his feet.
Mother:That could not be so. What put that thought in your mind?
Child:I called to him to come back for the branch, and he turned where he was in the river, and he bade me to bring it back, and to show it to yourself.
Mother:(Taking the branch.) There are fruit and flowers on it. It is a branch that is not of any earthly tree. (Falls on her knees.) He is gone, he is gone, and I never knew him! He was that stranger that gave me all! He is the King of the World!
THE GAOL GATE
Scene: Outside the gate of Galway Gaol. Two countrywomen, one in a long dark cloak, the other with a shawl over her head, have just come in. It is just before dawn.
Mary Cahel:I am thinking we are come to our journey’s end, and that this should be the gate of the gaol.
Mary Cushin:It is certain it could be no other place. There was surely never in the world such a terrible great height of a wall.
Mary Cahel:He that was used to the mountain to be closed up inside of that! What call had he to go moonlighting or to bring himself into danger at all?
Mary Cushin:It is no wonder a man to grow faint-hearted and he shut away from the light. I never would wonder at all at anything he might be driven to say.
Mary Cahel:There were good men were gaoled before him never gave in to anyone at all. It is what I am thinking, Mary, he might not have done what they say.
Mary Cushin:Sure you heard what the neighbours were calling the time their own boys were brought away. “It is Denis Cahel,” they were saying, “that informed against them in the gaol.”
Mary Cahel:There is nothing that is bad or is wicked but a woman will put it out of her mouth, and she seeing them that belong to her brought away from her sight and her home.
Mary Cushin:Terry Fury’s mother was saying it, and Pat Ruane’s mother and his wife. They came out calling it after me, “It was Denis swore against them in the gaol!” The sergeant was boasting, they were telling me, the day he came searching Daire-caol, it was he himself got his confession with drink he had brought him in the gaol.
Mary Cahel:They might have done that, the ruffians, and the boy have no blame on him at all. Why should it be cast up against him, and his wits being out of him with drink?
Mary Cushin:If he did give their names up itself, there was maybe no wrong in it at all. Sure it’s known to all the village it was Terry that fired the shot.
Mary Cahel:Stop your mouth now and don’t be talking. You haven’t any sense worth while. Let the sergeant do his own business with no help from the neighbours at all.
Mary Cushin:It was Pat Ruane that temptedthem on account of some vengeance of his own. Every creature knows my poor Denis never handled a gun in his life.
Mary Cahel:(Taking from under her cloak a long blue envelope.) I wish we could know what is in the letter they are after sending us through the post. Isn’t it a great pity for the two of us to be without learning at all?
Mary Cushin:There are some of the neighbours have learning, and you bade me not bring it anear them. It would maybe have told us what way he is or what time he will be quitting the gaol.
Mary Cahel:There is wonder on me, Mary Cushin, that you would not be content with what I say. It might be they put down in the letter that Denis informed on the rest.
Mary Cushin:I suppose it is all we have to do so, to stop here for the opening of the door. It’s a terrible long road from Slieve Echtge we were travelling the whole of the night.
Mary Cahel:There was no other thing for us to do but to come and to give him a warning. What way would he be facing the neighbours, and he to come back to Daire-caol?
Mary Cushin:It is likely they will let him go free, Mary, before many days will be out. What call have they to be keeping him? It is certain they promised him his life.
Mary Cahel:If they promised him his life, Mary Cushin, he must live it in some other place. Let him never see Daire-caol again, or Daroda or Druimdarod.
Mary Cushin:O, Mary, what place will we bring him to, and we driven from the place that we know? What person that is sent among strangers can have one day’s comfort on earth?
Mary Cahel:It is only among strangers, I am thinking, he could be hiding his story at all. It is best for him to go to America, where the people are as thick as grass.
Mary Cushin:What way could he go to America and he having no means in his hand? There’s himself and myself to make the voyage and the little one-een at home.
Mary Cahel:I would sooner to sell the holding than to ask for the price paid for blood. There’ll be money enough for the two of you to settle your debts and to go.
Mary Cushin:And what would yourself be doing and we to go over the sea? It is not among the neighbours you would wish to be ending your days.
Mary Cahel:I am thinking there is no one would know me in the workhouse at Oughterard. I wonder could I go in there, and I not to give them my name?
Mary Cushin:Ah, don’t be talking foolishness.What way could I bring the child? Sure he’s hardly out of the cradle; he’d be lost out there in the States.
Mary Cahel:I could bring him into the workhouse, I to give him some other name. You could send for him when you’d be settled or have some place of your own.
Mary Cushin:It is very cold at the dawn. It is time for them open the door. I wish I had brought a potato or a bit of a cake or of bread.
Mary Cahel:I’m in dread of it being opened and not knowing what will we hear. The night that Denis was taken he had a great cold and a cough.
Mary Cushin:I think I hear some person coming. There’s a sound like the rattling of keys. God and His Mother protect us! I’m in dread of being found here at all!
(The gate is opened, and the Gatekeeper is seen with a lantern in his hand.)
Gatekeeper:What are you doing here, women? It’s no place to be spending the night time.
Mary Cahel:It is to speak with my son I am asking, that is gaoled these eight weeks and a day.
Gatekeeper:If you have no order to visit him it’s as good for you go away home.
Mary Cahel:I got this letter ere yesterday. It might be it is giving me leave.
Gatekeeper:If that’s so he should be under the doctor, or in the hospital ward.
Mary Cahel:It’s no wonder if he’s down with the hardship, for he had a great cough and a cold.
Gatekeeper:Give me here the letter to read it. Sure it never was opened at all.
Mary Cahel:Myself and this woman have no learning. We were loth to trust any other one.
Gatekeeper:It was posted in Galway the twentieth, and this is the last of the month.
Mary Cahel:We never thought to call at the post office. It was chance brought it to us in the end.
Gatekeeper:(Having read letter.) You poor unfortunate women, don’t you know Denis Cahel is dead? You’d a right to come this time yesterday if you wished any last word at all.
Mary Cahel:(Kneeling down.) God and His Mother protect us and have mercy on Denis’s soul!
Mary Cushin:What is the man after saying? Sure it cannot be Denis is dead?
Gatekeeper:Dead since the dawn of yesterday, and another man now in his cell. I’ll go see who has charge of his clothing if you’re wanting to bring it away.
(He goes in. The dawn has begun to break.)
Mary Cahel:There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth.There will surely be mercy found for him, and not the hard judgment of men! But my boy that was best in the world, that never rose a hair of my head, to have died with his name under blemish, and left a great shame on his child! Better for him have killed the whole world than to give any witness at all! Have you no word to say, Mary Cushin? Am I left here to keen him alone?
Mary Cushin:(Who has sunk on to the step before the door, rocking herself and keening.) Oh, Denis, my heart is broken you to have died with the hard word upon you! My grief you to be alone now that spent so many nights in company!
What way will I be going back through Gort and through Kilbecanty? The people will not be coming out keening you, they will say no prayer for the rest of your soul!
What way will I be the Sunday and I going up the hill to the Mass? Every woman with her own comrade, and Mary Cushin to be walking her lone!
What way will I be the Monday and the neighbours turning their heads from the house? The turf Denis cut lying on the bog, and no well-wisher to bring it to the hearth!
What way will I be in the night time, and none but the dog calling after you? Two women to be mixing a cake, and not a man in the house to break it!
What way will I sow the field, and no man todrive the furrow? The sheaf to be scattered before springtime that was brought together at the harvest!
I would not begrudge you, Denis, and you leaving praises after you. The neighbours keening along with me would be better to me than an estate.
But my grief your name to be blackened in the time of the blackening of the rushes! Your name never to rise up again in the growing time of the year! (She ceases keening and turns towards the old woman.) But tell me, Mary, do you think would they give us the body of Denis? I would lay him out with myself only; I would hire some man to dig the grave.
(The Gatekeeper opens the gate and hands out some clothes.)
Gatekeeper:There now is all he brought in with him; the flannels and the shirt and the shoes. It is little they are worth altogether; those mountainy boys do be poor.
Mary Cushin:They had a right to give him time to ready himself the day they brought him to the magistrates. He to be wearing his Sunday coat, they would see he was a decent boy. Tell me where will they bury him, the way I can follow after him through the street? There is no other one to show respect to him but Mary Cahel, his mother, and myself.
Gatekeeper:That is not to be done. He is buried since yesterday in the field that is belonging to the gaol.
Mary Cushin:It is a great hardship that to have been done, and not one of his own there to follow after him at all.
Gatekeeper:Those that break the law must be made an example of. Why would they be laid out like a well behaved man? A long rope and a short burying, that is the order for a man that is hanged.
Mary Cushin:A man that was hanged! O Denis, was it they that made an end of you and not the great God at all? His curse and my own curse upon them that did not let you die on the pillow! The curse of God be fulfilled that was on them before they were born! My curse upon them that brought harm on you, and on Terry Fury that fired the shot!
Mary Cahel:(Standing up.) And the other boys, did they hang them along with him, Terry Fury and Pat Ruane that were brought from Daire-caol?
Gatekeeper:They did not, but set them free twelve hours ago. It is likely you may have passed them in the night time.
Mary Cushin:Set free is it, and Denis made an end of? What justice is there in the world at all?
Gatekeeper:He was taken near the house. They knew his footmark. There was no witness given against the rest worth while.
Mary Cahel:Then the sergeant was lying and the people were lying when they said Denis Cahel had informed in the gaol?
Gatekeeper:I have no time to be stopping here talking. The judge got no evidence and the law set them free.
(He goes in and shuts gate after him.)
Mary Cahel:(Holding out her hands.) Are there any people in the streets at all till I call on them to come hither? Did they ever hear in Galway such a thing to be done, a man to die for his neighbour?
Tell it out in the streets for the people to hear, Denis Cahel from Slieve Echtge is dead. It was Denis Cahel from Daire-caol that died in the place of his neighbour!
It is he was young and comely and strong, the best reaper and the best hurler. It was not a little thing for him to die, and he protecting his neighbour!
Gather up, Mary Cushin, the clothes for your child; they’ll be wanted by this one and that one. The boys crossing the sea in the springtime will be craving a thread for a memory.
One word to the judge and Denis was free, they offered him all sorts of riches. They brought himdrink in the gaol, and gold, to swear away the life of his neighbour!
Pat Ruane was no good friend to him at all, but a foolish, wild companion; it was Terry Fury knocked a gap in the wall and sent in the calves to our meadow.
Denis would not speak, he shut his mouth, he would never be an informer. It is no lie he would have said at all giving witness against Terry Fury.
I will go through Gort and Kilbecanty and Druimdarod and Daroda; I will call to the people and the singers at the fairs to make a great praise for Denis!
The child he left in the house that is shook, it is great will be his boast in his father! All Ireland will have a welcome before him, and all the people in Boston.
I to stoop on a stick through half a hundred years, I will never be tired with praising! Come hither, Mary Cushin, till we’ll shout it through the roads, Denis Cahel died for his neighbour!
(She goes off to the left, Mary Cushin following her.)
Curtain
ListenPDF
The Red-Haired Man's Wife
ListenPDF
Granuaile
ListenPDF
johnny
ListenPDF
jhonny
ListenPDF
gaol
The idea of this play first came to me as a tragedy. I kept seeing as in a picture people sitting by the roadside, and a girl passing to the market, gay and fearless. And then I saw her passing by the same place at evening, her head hanging, the heads of others turned from her, because of some sudden story that had risen out of a chance word, and had snatched away her good name.
But comedy and not tragedy was wanted at our theatre to put beside the high poetic work,The King’s Threshold,The Shadowy Waters,On Baile’s Strand,The Well of the Saints; and I let laughter have its way with the little play. I was delayed in beginning it for a while, because I could only think of Bartley Fallon as dull-witted or silly or ignorant, and the handcuffs seem too harsh a punishment. But one day by the sea at Duras a melancholy man who was telling me of the crosses he had gone through at home said—“But I’m thinking if I went to America, its long ago to-day I’d be dead. And its a great expense for a poor man to be buried in America.” Bartley was born at that moment, and,far from harshness, I felt I was providing him with a happy old age in giving him the lasting glory of that great and crowning day of misfortune.
It has been acted very often by other companies as well as our own, and the Boers have done me the honour of translating and pirating it.
I was pointed out one evening a well-brushed, well-dressed man in the stalls, and was told gossip about him, perhaps not all true, which made me wonder if that appearance and behaviour as of extreme respectability might not now and again be felt a burden.
After a while he translated himself in my mind into Hyacinth; and as one must set one’s original a little way off to get a translation rather than a tracing, he found himself in Cloon, where, as in other parts of our country, “character” is built up or destroyed by a password or an emotion, rather than by experience and deliberation.
The idea was more of a universal one than I knew at the first, and I have had but uneasy appreciation from some apparently blameless friends.
When I was a child and came with my elders to Galway for their salmon fishing in the river thatrushes past the gaol, I used to look with awe at the window where men were hung, and the dark, closed gate. I used to wonder if ever a prisoner might by some means climb the high, buttressed wall and slip away in the darkness by the canal to the quays and find friends to hide him under a load of kelp in a fishing boat, as happens to my ballad-singing man. The play was considered offensive to some extreme Nationalists before it was acted, because it showed the police in too favourable a light, and a Unionist paper attacked it after it was acted because the policeman was represented “as a coward and a traitor”; but after the Belfast police strike that same paper praised its “insight into Irish character.” After all these ups and downs it passes unchallenged on both sides of the Irish Sea.
The first play I wrote was called “Twenty-five.” It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America. It was about “A boy of Kilbecanty that saved his old sweetheart from being evicted. It was playing Twenty-five he did it; played with the husband he did, letting him win up to £50.”
It was rather sentimental and weak in construction, and for a long time it was an overflowing storehouse of examples of “the faults of my dramatic method.” I have at last laid its ghost in “The Jackdaw,” and I have not been accused of sentimentality since the appearance of this.
I heard of an old man in the workhouse who had been disabled many years before by, I think, a knife thrown at him by his wife in some passionate quarrel.
One day I heard the wife had been brought in there, poor and sick. I wondered how they would meet, and if the old quarrel was still alive, or if they who knew the worst of each other would be better pleased with one another’s company than with that of strangers.
I wrote a scenario of the play, Dr. Douglas Hyde, getting in plot what he gave back in dialogue, for at that time we thought a dramatic movement in Irish would be helpful to our own as well as to the Gaelic League. Later I tried to rearrange it for our own theatre, and for three players only, but in doing this I found it necessary to write entirely new dialogue, the two old men in the original play obviously talking at an audience in the wards, which is no longer there.
I sometimes think the two scolding paupers are a symbol of ourselves in Ireland—Gaelic proverb—“it is better to be quarrelling than to be lonesome.” The Rajputs, that great fighting race, when they were told they had been brought under the Pax Britannica and must give up war, gave themselves to opium in its place, but Connacht has not yet planted its poppy gardens.
An old woman living in a cabin by a bog road onSlieve Echtge told me the legend on which this play is founded, and which I have already published in “Poets and Dreamers.”
“There was a poor girl walking the road one night with no place to stop, and the Saviour met her on the road, and He said—‘Go up to the house you see a light in; there’s a woman dead there, and they’ll let you in.’ So she went, and she found the woman laid out, and the husband and other people; but she worked harder than they all, and she stopped in the house after; and after two quarters the man married her. And one day she was sitting outside the door, picking over a bag of wheat, and the Saviour came again, with the appearance of a poor man, and He asked her for a few grains of the wheat. And she said—‘Wouldn’t potatoes be good enough for you?’ And she called to the girl within to bring out a few potatoes. But He took nine grains of the wheat in His hand and went away; and there wasn’t a grain of wheat left in the bag, but all gone. So she ran after Him then to ask Him to forgive her; and she overtook Him on the road, and she asked forgiveness. And He said—‘Don’t you remember the time you had no house to go to, and I met you on the road, and sent you to a house where you’d live in plenty? And now you wouldn’t give Me a few grains of wheat.’ And she said—‘But why didn’t you give me a heart that would like to divide it?’ That is how she came round on Him. And He said—‘From this out, whenever you have plenty in your hands, divide it freely for My sake.’”
And an old woman who sold sweets in a little shop in Galway, and whose son became a great Dominican preacher, used to say—“Refuse not any, for one may be the Christ.”
I owe the Rider’s Song, and some of the rest, to W. B. Yeats.
I was told a story some one had heard, of a man who had gone to welcome his brother coming out of gaol, and heard he had died there before the gates had been opened for him.
I was going to Galway, and at the Gort station I met two cloaked and shawled countrywomen from the slopes of Slieve Echtge, who were obliged to go and see some law official in Galway because of some money left them by a kinsman in Australia. They had never been in a train or to any place farther than a few miles from their own village, and they felt astray and terrified “like blind beasts in a bog” they said, and I took care of them through the day.
An agent was fired at on the road from Athenry, and some men were taken up on suspicion. One of them was a young carpenter from my old home, and in a little time a rumour was put about that he had informed against the others in Galway gaol. When the prisoners were taken across the bridge to the courthouse he was hooted by the crowd. But at the trial it was found that he had not informed, that no evidence had been given at all; and bonfires were lighted for him as he went home.
These three incidents coming within a few months wove themselves into this little play, and within three days it had written itself, or been written. I like it better than any in the volume, and I have never changed a word of it.
Spreading the Newswas produced for the first time at the opening of the Abbey Theatre, on Tuesday, 27th December, 1904, with the following cast:
Hyacinth Halveywas first produced at the Abbey Theatre on 19th February, 1906, with the following cast:
The Gaol Gatewas first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 20th October, 1906, with the following cast:
The Jackdawwas first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 23rd February, 1907, with the following cast:
The Rising of the Moonwas first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 9th March, 1907, with the following cast:
Workhouse Wardwas first produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 20th April, 1908, with the following cast:
Complete Catalogues senton application
The Golden AppleA Kiltartan Play for ChildrenByLADY GREGORYAuthor of “Seven Short Plays”“Our Irish Theatre”“Irish Folk-History Plays,” etc.8oEight full-page Illustrations in color$1.25 net.This play deals with the adventures of the King of Ireland’s son, who goes in search of the Golden Apple of Healing. The scenes are laid in the Witch’s Garden, the Giant’s House, the Wood of Wonders, and the King of Ireland’s Room. It is both humorous and lyrical, and should please children and their elders, alike. The colored illustrations have the same old faery-tale air as the play itself.G. P. Putnam’s SonsNew YorkLondon
ByLADY GREGORY
This play deals with the adventures of the King of Ireland’s son, who goes in search of the Golden Apple of Healing. The scenes are laid in the Witch’s Garden, the Giant’s House, the Wood of Wonders, and the King of Ireland’s Room. It is both humorous and lyrical, and should please children and their elders, alike. The colored illustrations have the same old faery-tale air as the play itself.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Irish Folk-History PlaysByLADY GREGORYFirst Series. The TragediesGRANIAKINCORADERVORGILLASecond Series. The Tragic ComediesTHE CANAVANSTHE WHITE COCKADETHE DELIVERER2 vols. Each, $1.5O net. By mail, $1.65Lady Gregory has preferred going for her material to the traditional folk-history rather than to the authorized printed versions, and she has been able, in so doing, to make her plays more living. One of these,Kincora, telling of Brian Boru, who reigned in the year 1000, evoked such keen local interest that an old farmer travelled from the neighborhood of Kincora to see it acted in Dublin.The story ofGrania, on which Lady Gregory has founded one of these plays, was taken entirely from tradition. Grania was a beautiful young woman and was to have been married to Finn, the great leader of the Fenians; but before the marriage, she went away from the bridegroom with his handsome young kinsman, Diarmuid. After many years, when Diarmuid had died (and Finn had a hand in his death), she went back to Finn and became his queen.Another of Lady Gregory’s plays,The Canavansdealt with the stormy times of Queen Elizabeth, whose memory is a horror in Ireland second only to that of Cromwell.The White Cockadeis founded on a tradition of King James having escaped from Ireland after the battle of the Boyne in a wine barrel.The choice of folk history rather than written history gives a freshness of treatment and elasticity of material which made the late J. M. Synge say that “Lady Gregory’s method had brought back the possibility of writing historic plays.”All these plays, exceptGrania, which has not yet been staged, have been very successfully performed in Ireland. They are written in the dialect of Kiltartan, which had already become familiar to readers of Lady Gregory’s books.G. P. Putnam’s SonsNew YorkLondon
ByLADY GREGORY
Lady Gregory has preferred going for her material to the traditional folk-history rather than to the authorized printed versions, and she has been able, in so doing, to make her plays more living. One of these,Kincora, telling of Brian Boru, who reigned in the year 1000, evoked such keen local interest that an old farmer travelled from the neighborhood of Kincora to see it acted in Dublin.
The story ofGrania, on which Lady Gregory has founded one of these plays, was taken entirely from tradition. Grania was a beautiful young woman and was to have been married to Finn, the great leader of the Fenians; but before the marriage, she went away from the bridegroom with his handsome young kinsman, Diarmuid. After many years, when Diarmuid had died (and Finn had a hand in his death), she went back to Finn and became his queen.
Another of Lady Gregory’s plays,The Canavansdealt with the stormy times of Queen Elizabeth, whose memory is a horror in Ireland second only to that of Cromwell.
The White Cockadeis founded on a tradition of King James having escaped from Ireland after the battle of the Boyne in a wine barrel.
The choice of folk history rather than written history gives a freshness of treatment and elasticity of material which made the late J. M. Synge say that “Lady Gregory’s method had brought back the possibility of writing historic plays.”
All these plays, exceptGrania, which has not yet been staged, have been very successfully performed in Ireland. They are written in the dialect of Kiltartan, which had already become familiar to readers of Lady Gregory’s books.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons