The Abbey Theatre: 1900–1917

At Lady Gregory’s Galway estate in 1897, Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn dreamed of creating a truly Irish theater, one that presented Irish plays with Irish players. They initially established the Irish Literary Theatre, which played in different Dublin houses to small audiences. In 1904, Yeats and Lady Gregory secured the rights to a theater on Lower Abbey Street, Dublin, which came to serve as a permanent home. The company, now known as the Abbey Theatre, opened with plays by Yeats and Lady Gregory on December 27, 1904. The Abbey’s naturalistic performance style and spare sets, designed by the Fay brothers, began to influence playhouses across the country and abroad, especially when J. M. Synge joined Yeats and Lady Gregory as a third director and became its most important playwright. Synge’s 1907 The Playboy of the Western World caused riots in the theater for its language and depiction of Irish rural life, and Yeats climbed on the stage to defend it. The Abbey’s production of G. B. Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet was an act of defiance after English censors banned it. In fact, many of the Abbey’s actors and playwrights became ardent nationalists, including Constance Markievicz, Sean Connolly and Thomas MacDonagh, each of whom fought in the 1916 Easter Rising, the latter two dying in the effort.

Woodcut by Fergus O’Ryan. The Abbey Theatre. [c. 1955].

A Limerick-born artist, Fergus O’Ryan attended Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art, whose alumni included W. B. Yeats and George Russell (AE). He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1960. The woodcut has a stage-curtain design, black borders, and artist signature printed in the lower-right corner.

Edited by W. B. Yeats. Beltaine, The Organ of The Irish Literary Theatre, Number One. London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, May 1899.

Contributions by W. B. Yeats, Lionel Johnson, George Moore, and C. H. Herford.

Started by W. B. Yeats to promote the work of the newly established Irish Literary Theatre (later to become the Abbey Theatre), Beltaine was an occasional publication that had put out three issues through spring 1900.  One of four ancient seasonal Irish festivals, “Beltaine” is the ancient Irish May Day, marking the beginning of summer and the driving of cattle to their summer fields, with great bonfires being lit to guard against evil.

Sara Allgood as “Kathleen.”

Vintage photograph of the 1912 production of W. B. Yeats’s Kathleen ni Houlihan. Provenance: Lady Gregory.

Sara Allgood, who studied acting under the Fay brothers and Maud Gonne when she was only twenty years old, became the actress perhaps most associated with the Abbey Theatre. She originated roles in Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News (1904), in Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1905) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), and in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Later Allgood moved to Hollywood, where she starred in early films by Alfred Hitchcock and in John Ford’s How Green was my Valley.  Her younger sister Maire O’Neill, also an important actress for the Abbey Theatre, was Synge’s fiancée before his early death.

Lady Gregory. The Losing Game: A Play in One Act. In The Gael. December 1902.

Lady Gregory’s first play was published when she was nearly fifty years old and collaborating with W. B. Yeats on his search for folklore. Owing to her superior ability at folk dialect, she occasionally helped with his plays, in fact writing the famous nationalist ending of Cathleen ni Houlihan. She also understood the need for new Irish comedies. Beginning with The Losing Game in 1902, she wrote nearly three dozen plays in twenty-five years, including many of the Abbey Theatre’s most revived works.

J. M. Synge. Flyer advertising The Well of the Saints, A New Play in Three Acts. February 4, 1905.

J. M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints was the only other three-act play, in addition to The Playboy of the Western World, that he saw performed at the Abbey Theatre during his lifetime. Adapted from a fable he heard on the Aran Islands about a miracle well that could cure blindness, he likened the play to “a monochrome painting, all in shades of one colour.”  Samuel Beckett was a deep admirer of Synge’s work, and The Well of the Saints has been called a precursor to Waiting for Godot.

W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Autograph manuscript draft of The Kings Threshold. 1903.

Gregory began to assist Yeats soon after they met: taking dictation, organizing his manuscripts, and typing them up. She initially reveled in helping a man who represented himself as the Shelleyan ideal of poet, legislator, and seer. This manuscript in her handwriting is for his play The King’s Threshold, in which a poet threatens to starve himself to death to protest the loss of hereditary respect given to bards. It extols poets as “creators of all values. . . . No woman would be beautiful if they had not praised beauty.” Gregory soon contributed directly and ever-more widely to Yeats’s work, by 1908 collaborating with him on more than a dozen plays. In an acquiescence that had benefits for her at the time but rankled later, Gregory saw them published under his name alone.

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Promotional postcard for Abbey Theatre productions of W. B. Yeats’s play The Hour Glass, 1904.

Promotional photographic postcards, sold as part of the Irish National Theatre Series in support of the Abbey Theatre: one of Lady Gregory’s play The Rising of the Moon, inscribed by Lady Gregory “From A Gregory April 17, 1910” and one of  J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea, 1904.

The Abbey Theatre Series of Plays. Dublin: Maunsel & Co., (1905-1911).

W. B. Yeats wanted this paper-wrapped series of plays to be available to audiences prior to and during the productions. This series bears Elinor Monsell’s famous Abbey Theatre symbol, Queen Maeve and her Irish wolfhound.  Displayed here are three of the fifteen volumes in the first important series.

a) Spreading the News: The Rising of the Moon: The Poorhouse (with Douglas Hyde). Being Vol. IX of the Abbey Theatre Series. Lady Gregory. Dublin: Maunsel & Co., 1906. Inscribed: “To John Quinn, that wonder of the western world, from the writer, A. Gregory, 1906.”

Quinn, a lawyer and collector of literary manuscripts and modern art, was the foremost American patron of the Irish Literary Revival. A friend and host of both Yeats and Lady Gregory, he and Lady Gregory even had a brief affair in 1910. In 1920, he defended James Joyce’s Ulysses and its American publishers Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap on charges of obscenity, a case they lost. Ulysses would not be published in the United States until a new trial in 1933.

b) The Playboy of the Western World. J. M. Synge.Vol. X, 1907.

c) When the Dawn Is Come. Thomas MacDonagh. Vol XI, 1908.

Samhain. December, 1904. Dublin: Sealy, Bryers, and Walker, 1904.

With sketches on the cover by John Butler Yeats of actors William Fay and Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh as characters in Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen.

Edited by W. B. Yeats, Samhain succeeded Beltaine as the organ for the Irish Literary Theatre. It contained the first appearances anywhere of Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan and J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen, which is also the first true publication of any of Synge’s work. One of four ancient Gaelic festivals, Samhain was held on November 1, marking the beginning of winter, approximately halfway between the September equinox and the December solstice.

Lady Gregory. Autograph manuscript of Hyacinth Halvey.

Sixty-five-page autograph manuscript of Lady Gregory’s play translated into Gaelic.

One of Lady Gregory’s most popular comedies, Hyacinth Halvey concerns a young man trying to ruin his own reputation to avoid respectability. This manuscript in Gaelic is bound in homemade wrappers with a hand-drawn title. It is likely a fair copy of the first Irish-language translation of the play, ascribed to Micheal O Droigheain and published in 1934, two years after Lady Gregory’s death.

J. M. Synge. The Playboy of the Western World. Dublin: Maunsel, 1907.

Inscribed to Karel Musek “with cordial remembrances, from J.M. Synge, April 10, 1907.”

No Abbey Theatre play received more notoriety than Synge’s Playboy, which on its first performance on January 26, 1907, caused riots in the theater by Irish and Catholic nationalists, who thought the play demeaned Irish morality. The uproar brought to the stage an angry Yeats, who defended it and later wrote a poem, “On Those That Hated ‘The Playboy of the Western World.’” More rioting occurred on the play’s opening in other cities, even resulting in the cast’s arrest during a production in Philadelphia in 1912. This rare presentation copy was for the man who first brought Synge’s work to the Continent.

Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald, and Arthur Shields in The Playboy of the Western World, 1907.

Press photograph.

Fitzgerald, shown here beside his brother, Arthur Shields, appeared in many landmark plays for the Abbey Theatre and in films, including Bringing up Baby, How Green Was My Valley, and Going My Way, for which he won an Academy Award.

J. M. Synge. 1907.

Vintage photograph.

Inscribed on the reverse: “The photograph was taken in July 1906 during the Abbey Theatre company’s visit to Edinburgh. Photo the Green Studio Edinburgh.” Although Synge was a photographer himself, most notably of Aran Islands scenes between 1898 and 1903, he rarely sat for studio photographs himself. He died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1909.

W. B. Yeats. The Countess Cathleen.

Carbon typescript, 1912, 65 pages, with notes by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

After its first printing in 1892, W. B. Yeats continually revised his verse drama, culminating in this version for the Abbey Theatre in 1911. It was, he wrote, “all but a new play.” With letters by both himself and Lady Gregory, Yeats sent this typescript copy to Czech theater producer Karel Musek, who had earlier staged  J. M. Synge’s work in Prague. Musek’s visit to Coole, he writes here,  “was the first important sign that our movement [the Revival] was recognized on the Continent.”

Program, Philadelphia, January 15, 1912. Announcing “The Famous Irish Players from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin” in a production of The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge.

Following the uproar in Dublin during the first production, this production led to riots by Irish American nationalists and the arrest of the cast for public indecency.