The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. Volume 4 of 8. The Hour-glass. Cathleen ni Houlihan. The Golden Helmet. The Irish Dramatic Movement

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

Feb. 19th. The Last Feast of the Fianna, by Alice Milligan.

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’sIrish National Dramatic Companyat St. Teresa’s Hall, Clarendon Street

April 2nd. Deirdre, by ‘A.E.’

Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W. B. Yeats.

Irish National Dramatic Companyat Antient Concert Rooms

Oct. 29th. The Sleep of the King, by Seumas O’Cuisin.

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

March 14th. The Hour-Glass, by W. B. Yeats.

Twenty-five, by Lady Gregory.

Oct. 8th. The King’s Threshold, by W. B. Yeats.

In the Shadow of the Glen, by J. M. Synge.

Dec. 3rd. Broken Soil, by P. Colm.

1904

Jan. 14th. The Shadowy Waters, by W. B. Yeats.

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

Dec. 27th. On Baile’s Strand, by W. B. Yeats.

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.

Oct. 20th. The Gaol Gate, by Lady Gregory.

The Mineral Workers, by William Boyle.

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

Dec. 8th. The Shadowy Waters (new version), by W. B. Yeats.

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.

Oct. 31st. Dervorgilla, by Lady Gregory.

The Canavans (new version), by Lady Gregory.

Nov. 21st.

The Unicorn from the Stars, by Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats.

1908

Feb. 15th. The Man who Missed the Tide, by W. F. Casey.

The Piper, by Norreys Connell.

March 19th. The Pie-dish, by George Fitzmaurice.

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.’