Abstract
When explaining in the preface to his Plays in Prose and Verse in 1922 how often Lady Gregory had collaborated with him in playwriting, Yeats concluded that of the eleven plays in the volume only two could be considered “wholly” his work (VPl 1306). So extensive was the collaboration in the years between Lady Gregory’s first tentative contribution of “a sentence here and there”1 to Diarmuid and Grania in 1900, and the last occasion of their working together in 1927,2 that even its full range remains uncertain. For besides contributing abundantly to each other’s work — Yeats’s influence, as critic, on Lady Gregory’s plays being no less considerable than her more direct contribution to his — they worked together on numerous other projects: writing scenarios for Douglas Hyde, constructing an acting version of Deirdre of the Sorrows from the fragmented mass of manuscripts left by Synge at his death, and, throughout their time at the Abbey, acting as critics and “playdoctors” to the hundreds of scripts submitted for their consideration.3
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Notes
Lady Gregory, Our Irish Theatre (London: Putnam, 1913) p. 80.
Yeats and Lady Gregory doubtless continued to comment on one another’s work up until her death in 1932, but their revisions together of dialogue for his version of Sophocles’ King Oedipus appears to have been their last formal collaboration. See David R. Clark and James B. McGuire, “The Writing of Sophocles’ King Oedipus”, YAACTS 2, 1984, 30–74.
George Moore, Ave (London: Heinemann, 1911) p. 273.
William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: the Life of John Butler Yeats 1839–1922 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978) p. 201.
George Moore, Vale (London: Heinemann, 1914) p. 204.
Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954) p. 295, quoting Yeats’s notes “for Horace Plunkett’s use during the inquiry of 1904 into the Abbey theatre’s patent”.
Quoted in Donald Torchiana W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1966) p. 79.
Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers (London: John Murray, 1903) pp. 49–51.
Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh The Splendid Years: Recollections of Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh as told to Edward Kenny (Dublin: James Duffy, 1955) p. 20.
Mary Colum, Life and the Dream (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1947) p. 139.
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© 1997 Deirdre Toomey
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Pethica, J. (1997). “Our Kathleen”: Yeats’s Collaboration with Lady Gregory in the Writing of Cathleen ni Houlihan . In: Toomey, D. (eds) Yeats and Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25822-2_6
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