Theatre and Politics : Maud Gonne

Abstract

Y eats’ early visits to Coole were interrupted by his work on the ′98 Commemoration Committee, which often took him to Dublin. He had become President of the Wolfe Tone Memorial Association ; the story of how he reached this high office is a curious one, and has never been told in detail. Shortly before he moved into the rooms in Woburn Buildings, he met T. W. Rolleston in a cafe in the Strand, and Rolleston spoke to him of recent developments in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the secret organisation of “physical force” Nationalists which dated from the Fenian rising in the Sixties. Yeats had always regarded himself as an I.R.B. man. It is true that he had never taken the oath, but neither had John O’Leary, by whom he had been admitted into the organisation.¹ Nor probably had he ever attended any of its meetings, but he understood himself to be with the party on the major issues and wished to capture it for his imaginative movement, O’Leary having long ago said to him that “in this country a man must have upon his side the Church or the Fenians, and you will never have the Church”.