Part 16

_The Hour-Glass_ was first played in The Molesworth Hall, Dublin, with the following cast:—Wise Man, Mr. T. Dudley Digges; His Wife, Miss M. T. Quinn; The Fool, Mr. F. J. Fay; Pupils, P. J. Kelly, P. Columb, C. Caufield.

We always play it in front of an olive-green curtain, and dress the Wise Man and his Pupils in various shades of purple. Because in all these decorative schemes one needs, as I think, a third colour subordinate to the other two, we have partly dressed the Fool in red-brown, which is repeated in the furniture. There is some green in his dress and in that of the Wife of the Wise Man who is dressed mainly in purple.

One sometimes has need of more lines of the little song, and I have put into English rhyme three of the many verses of a Gaelic ballad:

I was going the road one day (O the brown and the yellow beer!) And I met with a man that was no right man (O my dear, my dear).

‘Give me your wife,’ said he, (O the brown and the yellow beer!) ‘Till the sun goes down and an hour of the clock’ (O my dear, my dear).

‘Good-bye, good-bye, my husband,’ (O the brown and the yellow beer!) ‘For a year and a day by the clock of the sun’ (O my dear, my dear).

APPENDIX II

_CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN._

MY DEAR LADY GREGORY,—

When I was a boy I used to wander about at Rosses Point and Ballisodare listening to old songs and stories. I wrote down what I heard and made poems out of the stories or put them into the little chapters of the first edition of _The Celtic Twilight_, and that is how I began to write in the Irish way.

Then I went to London to make my living, and though I spent a part of every year in Ireland and tried to keep the old life in my memory by reading every country tale I could find in books or old newspapers, I began to forget the true countenance of country life. The old tales were still alive for me indeed, but with a new, strange, half-unreal life, as if in a wizard’s glass, until at last, when I had finished _The Secret Rose_, and was half-way through _The Wind Among the Reeds_, a wise woman in her trance told me that my inspiration was from the moon, and that I should always live close to water, for my work was getting too full of those little jewelled thoughts that come from the sun and have no nation. I had no need to turn to my books of astrology to know that the common people are under the moon, or to Porphyry to remember the image-making power of the waters. Nor did I doubt the entire truth of what she said to me, for my head was full of fables that I had no longer the knowledge and emotion to write. Then you brought me with you to see your friends in the cottages, and to talk to old wise men on Slieve Echtge, and we gathered together, or you gathered for me, a great number of stories and traditional beliefs. You taught me to understand again, and much more perfectly than before, the true countenance of country life.

One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Houlihan for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little play I could make others see my dream as I had seen it, but I could not get down out of that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all you had done for me I had not the country speech. One has to live among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, ‘She has been a serving-maid among us,’ before one can think the thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my dream into the little play, _Cathleen ni Houlihan_, and when we gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the working-people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic fables into speech. Some of these have already been acted, but some may not be acted for a long time, but all seem to me, though they were but a part of a summer’s work, to have more of that countenance of country life than anything I have done since I was a boy.

W. B. YEATS.

_Feb., 1903._

This play was first played on April 2, 1902, in St. Teresa’s Hall, Dublin, with the following cast:—Cathleen, Miss Maude Gonne; Delia Cahel, Miss Maire nic Sheublagh; Bridget Gillan, Miss M. T. Quinn; Patrick Gillan, Mr. C. Caufield; Michael Gillan, Mr. T. Dudley Digges; Peter Gillan, Mr. W. G. Fay.

Miss Maude Gonne played very finely, and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity. Since then the part has been twice played in America by women who insisted on keeping their young faces, and one of these when she came to the door dropped her cloak, as I have been told, and showed a white satin dress embroidered with shamrocks. Upon another,—or was it the same occasion?—the player of Bridget wore a very becoming dress of the time of Louis the Fourteenth. The most beautiful woman of her time, when she played my Cathleen, ‘made up’ centuries old, and never should the part be played but with a like sincerity. This was the first play of our Irish School of folk-drama, and in it that way of quiet movement and careful speech which has given our players some little fame first showed itself, arising partly out of deliberate opinion and partly out of the ignorance of the players. Does art owe most to ignorance or to knowledge? Certainly it comes to its deathbed full of knowledge. I cannot imagine this play, or any folk-play of our school, acted by players with no knowledge of the peasant, and of the awkwardness and stillness of bodies that have followed the plough, or too lacking in humility to copy these things without convention or caricature.

The lines beginning ‘Do not make a great keening’ and ‘They shall be remembered for ever’ are said or sung to an air heard by one of the players in a dream. This music is with the other music at the end of the third volume.

APPENDIX III

_THE GOLDEN HELMET._

_The Golden Helmet_ was produced at the Abbey Theatre on March 19, 1908, with the following cast:—Cuchulain, J. M. Kerrigan; Conal, Arthur Sinclair; Leagerie, Fred. O’ Donovan; Laeg, Sydney Morgan; Emer, Sara Allgood; Conal’s Wife, Maire O’Neill; Leagerie’s Wife, Eileen O’ Doherty; Red Man, Ambrose Power; Horseboys, Scullions, and Black Men, S. Hamilton, T. J. Fox, U. Wright, D. Robertson, T. O’Neill, I. A. O’Rourke, P. Kearney.

In performance we left the black hands to the imagination, and probably when there is so much noise and movement on the stage they would always fail to produce any effect. Our stage is too small to try the experiment, for they would be hidden by the figures of the players. We staged the play with a very pronounced colour-scheme, and I have noticed that the more obviously decorative is the scene and costuming of any play, the more it is lifted out of time and place, and the nearer to faeryland do we carry it. One gets also much more effect out of concerted movements—above all, if there are many players—when all the clothes are the same colour. No breadth of treatment gives monotony when there is movement and change of lighting. It concentrates attention on every new effect and makes every change of outline or of light and shadow surprising and delightful. Because of this one can use contrasts of colour, between clothes and background, or in the background itself, the complementary colours for instance, which would be too obvious to keep the attention in a painting. One wishes to make the movement of the action as important as possible, and the simplicity which gives depth of colour does this, just as, for precisely similar reasons, the lack of colour in a statue fixes the attention upon the form.

The play is founded upon an old Irish story, _The Feast of Bricriu_, given in _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, and is meant as an introduction to _On Baile’s Strand_.

APPENDIX IV

DATES AND PLACES OF THE FIRST PERFORMANCE OF NEW PLAYS PRODUCED BY THE NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY AND ITS PREDECESSORS:—

1899.

IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT ANTIENT CONCERT ROOMS.

May 8th. _The Countess Cathleen_, by W. B. Yeats.

May 9th. _The Heather Field_, by Edward Martyn.

1900.

IRISH LITERARY THEATRE AT THE GAIETY THEATRE.

{_The Last Feast of the Fianna_, by Alice Milligan. Feb. 19th. { {_Maeve_, by Edward Martyn.

Feb. 20th. _The Bending of the Bough_, by George Moore.

1901.

Oct. 21st. _Diarmuid and Grania_, by W. B. Yeats and George Moore. _The Twisting of the Rope_, by Douglas Hyde (first Gaelic play produced in a theatre).

1902.

MR. W. G. FAY’S IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ST. TERESA’S HALL, CLARENDON STREET.

{_Deirdre_, by ‘A.E.’ April 2nd. { {_Cathleen ni Houlihan_, by W. B. Yeats.

IRISH NATIONAL DRAMATIC COMPANY AT ANTIENT CONCERT ROOMS.

{_The Sleep of the King_, by Seumas O’Cuisin. Oct. 29th. { {_The Laying of the Foundations_, by Fred Ryan.

Oct. 30th. _A Pot of Broth_, by W. B. Yeats.

Oct. 31st. _The Racing Lug_, by Seumas O’Cuisin.

1903.

IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, MOLESWORTH HALL.

{_The Hour-Glass_, by W. B. Yeats. March 14th. { {_Twenty-five_, by Lady Gregory.

{_The King’s Threshold_, by W. B. Yeats. Oct. 8th. { {_In the Shadow of the Glen_, by J. M. Synge.

Dec. 3rd. _Broken Soil_, by P. Colm.

1904.

{_The Shadowy Waters_, by W. B. Yeats. Jan. 14th. { {_The Townland of Tamney_, by Seumas MacManus.

Feb. 25th. _Riders to the Sea_, by J. M. Synge.

IRISH NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY AT THE ABBEY THEATRE.

{_On Baile’s Strand_, by W. B. Yeats. Dec. 27th. { {_Spreading the News_, by Lady Gregory.

1905.

Feb. 4th. _The Well of the Saints_, by J. M. Synge.

March 25th. _Kincora_, by Lady Gregory.

April 25th. _The Building Fund_, by William Boyle.

June 9th. _The Land_, by P. Colm.

NATIONAL THEATRE SOCIETY, LTD.

Dec. 9th. _The White Cockade_, by Lady Gregory.

1906.

Jan. 20th. _The Eloquent Dempsey_, by William Boyle.

Feb. 19th. _Hyacinth Halvey_, by Lady Gregory.

{_The Gaol Gate_, by Lady Gregory. Oct. 20th. { {_The Mineral Workers_, by William Boyle.

Nov. 24th. _Deirdre_, by W. B. Yeats.

{_The Shadowy Waters_ (new version), by W. B. Yeats. Dec. 8th. { {_The Canavans_, by Lady Gregory.

1907.

Jan. 26th. _The Playboy of the Western World_, by J. M. Synge.

Feb. 23rd. _The Jackdaw_, by Lady Gregory.

March 9th. _Rising of the Moon_, by Lady Gregory.

April 1st. _The Eyes of the Blind_, by Miss W. M. Letts.

April 3rd. _The Poorhouse_, by Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde.

April 27th. _Fand_, by Wilfred Scawen Blunt.

Oct. 3rd. _The Country Dressmaker_, by George Fitzmaurice.

{_Dervorgilla_, by Lady Gregory. Oct. 31st. { {_The Canavans_ (new version), by Lady Gregory.

Nov. 21st. _The Unicorn from the Stars_, by Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats.

1908.

{_The Man who Missed the Tide_, by W. F. Casey. Feb. 15th. { {_The Piper_, by Norreys Connell.

{_The Pie-dish_, by George Fitzmaurice. March 19th. { {_The Golden Helmet_, by W. B. Yeats.

April 20th. _The Workhouse Ward_, by Lady Gregory.

In addition to these plays, many of which are constantly revived, translations of foreign masterpieces are given occasionally.

It was not until the opening of the Abbey Theatre that Lady Gregory, Mr. J. M. Synge, and Mr. W. B. Yeats became entirely responsible for the selection of plays, though they had been mainly so from 1903.

_Corrigenda._—P. 120, l. 5, for ‘severe’ read ‘serious’; p. 143, l. 4, for ‘prepared’ read ‘performed’; p. 176, l. 29, for ‘_their_ own day’ read ‘_our_ own day.’

_Printed by A. H. BULLEN, at The Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-on-Avon._

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Page 22, “aoor” changed to “door” (through the kitchen door)

Page 177, “monotous” changed to “monotonous” (monotonous to an ear)

Page 202, “A’Kempis” changed to “à Kempis” (wrote S. Thomas à Kempis)