In the Shadow of the Glen

Abstract

Looking back on it all, I can hardly believe how quickly events marched in 1903. It was truly our annus mirabilis.¹ We had begun it in a dire poverty that made us the laughing-stocks of Dublin, and you have to be a Dubliner to know how cruel that was. In those first days we were made to feel the force of the ancient sage’s words that the hardest thing about poverty is that it makes people laugh at you. Yet within six months of our beggarly beginnings we had performed in London and been acclaimed as masters and pioneers in our art by all the most eminent critics. In the autumn we revealed an Irish dramatist, whose work now belongs not to Ireland but to the world, and discovered the greatest Irish actress since Peg Woffington; and, to crown all, Miss Horniman ² paid her first visit to Dublin.

William G. Fay and Catherine Carswell The Fays of the Abbey Theatre (London: Rich and Cowan, 1935) pp. 136–41.