Irish History Articles - Yeats, Synge, and the Abbey Theatre

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
VII. Yeats, Synge, and the Abbey Theatre

by Dr. Sam Couch, Ph. D.
Owner, Rising Road Tours

Lady Augusta Gregory was the widow of a diplomat. After her husband's death, she cycled round the villages near her Galway home collecting on paper the folk-tales the people could still recite from memory. She filled books with them and wrote plays in "Kiltartanese" the English spoken by these Irish whose first language was Gaelic. The dialect was named for a local village. In 1898 she met the poet William Butler Yeats. With others they planned the Irish Literary Theatre which opened with his play Cathleen ni Houlihan in 1899. Other literary and artistic figures included the novelist George Moore and the young playwright John Millington Synge. The assembled talent of writers, actors and directors was formidable. With the help of English patronage they opened what Yeats called "a small dingy and impecunious theatre" in Abbey Street in 1904. Within a few years the Abbey was one of the world's most famous theatres.

If the world was appreciative, the Irish by and large were not. Most had strict ideas about what constituted propriety on the stage. They could be touchy, over-alert to suggestions of vulgarity and blasphemy. Yeats' first play, Countess Cathleen, provoked catcalls and abuse, but worse was to follow. The most dazzling wordsmith of the Abbey was Synge. Yeats encouraged him to move to the Aran Isles in Galway Bay with the injunction: "Express a life that has never found expression." Synge's finest play, The Playboy of the Western World, staged in 1907, had a plot filled with sparkle and the beauty of language - again using the charm and freshness of Gaelic forms in English - which few could match. Despite all this, the audience was outraged. The amoral attitude of Synge's country lasses was taken as a slight on the piety of Irish womanhood. There were frowns at the frivolous treatment of murder. The dreadful word "shift" for a lady's undergarment was used in the play. Their response was a riot.

For all their genius and industry, the promoters of the Abbey were not clever in their attempts to alert the Irish nation to the need for an intellectual rebirth, a riddance of fossil attitudes, to match the political freedom they sought. Yeats's poetry and the honesty that shines out of his prose and verse will ring down the ages, but his attitudes could be silly, and his postures and dress - the Byronic neckerchief and dangling shock of hair - risible. He plunged into spiritualism in any form and was undoubtedly fooled by some charlatans. He could surprise hosts by rising in the night to invoke the moon and see wild and beautiful visions. His head was not always in the clouds. He had endless earthy squabbles with Moore (who could himself be insufferable: "I came," he announced messianically, "to give Ireland back her language," which sounded odd from one who spoke no Gaelic) and discussed with all his friends Moore's irritating claims to a long record of sexual conquest. But the nature of his dream for Ireland limited the number of those prepared to assist him in achieving it. It was vague, visionary, and rather adolescent. He would attempt to unite theosophy and other mystical, cabalistic forms with Celtic druidism (about which almost nothing was known), and designated a ruined castle on an island in the middle of Lough Key as a Castle of Heroes, where those promoting the new Celtic rebirth would return from time to time to charge the batteries of inspiration through contact with the divine.

By 1912 the movement was over. Philistine derision of the Abbey productions had killed it. Synge was dead, Moore back in England, Yeats disillusioned. The last straw was Dublin's refusal to allow the millionaire Sire Hugh Lane to finance the building of an art gallery in Dublin and to fill it with his collection, particularly rich in Impressionists. The building was to span the River Liffey in the heart of Dublin. Lutyens had drawn designs, but Dublin was generally of the opinion that homegrown architects and artists were just as good as English or French.

Abbey plays were lampooned by their enemies for the romantic and sentimental view they took of the Irish lives they portrayed. They were given facetious marks for the presence or lack of what was mischievously called "peasant quality." Behind these charges lay a confident certainty that Yeats and his cronies failed to get to the heart of Ireland because they were molded of English clays. Like others, Yeats had been to school in England when his volatile father moved the family there for two years. The literature and history he knew were English. Ireland was a foster parent, for whom his affection seemed preposterous.

This series of articles is based on lectures given by Dr. Samuel Couch to Irish Studies courses at Georgia Southern University and Young Harris College between 1997 and 2004. Documented sources come from Couch's research and studies in American universities and with scholars in Ireland. The articles are in no way intended to be comprehensive.

Background materials come from, but are not limited to, readings in the following books:

Duffy, Sean, ed., Atlas of Irish History. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1997.
Joyce, P.W., Outlines of the History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1905. M.H. Gill & Son: Dublin. 1909.
Killeen, Richard, A Short History of Ireland. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1994.
Smyth, Daragh, A Guide to Irish Mythology. 2nd ed. Irish Academic Press: Dublin. 1996.

Any lack of attribution to primary sources is unintentional and the sole responsibility of Dr. Couch.

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Articles: 19th Century Ireland VII. Yeats, Synge, and the Abbey Theatre

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
VII. Yeats, Synge, and the Abbey Theatre