“A Play She Could Act in Dublin”

Chapter 2 follows the embodiments of Cathleen ni Houlihan by Maud Gonne and the tensions over ownership of that play, written with Lady Gregory with Gonne’s contributions to the staging, and created out of Yeats’s disappointment that Gonne rejected The Countess Cathleen. Beginning with Gonne’s real-life visitation dressed as a poor old woman at her own home, rented by Yeats, during the influenza pandemic of 1918 when she was on the run from the authorities, the chapter then explores Yeats’s earliest work with Gonne, challenging the “muse” designation, and focusing instead on Maud Gonne’s skills as a theatrical and political performer. The tensions over the ownership of that play between Yeats and Gonne show the two struggling over class, performance, and definitions of Irishness.

My Pegeen Mike

Molly Allgood’s contributions to Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, this chapter argues, are overdue for a reconsideration, and a close reading of their letters with the development of the play shows that there would have been no Playboy without Molly. This chapter follows the earlier discussions in highlighting the ways that current and Revival readings of theater are informed by assumptions about authorship that privilege men and how these concerns are bound up with gender roles. For example, Synge likely burned Allgood’s part of their correspondence due to his worries about her reputation; nonetheless, this chapter reads Allgood’s responses both in the handwritten notes she wrote in the margins of his surviving letters and in the context of Synge’s responses. In particular, the way that Molly brings her physical female body and the work of that body onto the stage and into the text are major contributions she made to The Playboy.

Collaboration and Yeats’s Deirdre

This chapter begins with the actual deaths of each of the actresses who contributed to Yeats’s Deirdre, stressing what is at stake in who gets credit for theatrical performance and then arguing for the different role each actress played in the development of this play. Yeats’s dependence on Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Florence Farr, Sara Allgood, Florence Darragh, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the creation of Deirdre clashed with his obsession with class-based individuality. Deirdre, like Yeats’s earliest plays written with and for Laura Armstrong, dramatizes the death of the heroine. Yeats tried to mold the Deirdre he wanted from actresses who appealed to him because they seemed other, different from the largely middle-class Abbey company, and reflective of his own ideal of female Irishness. The arguments between Yeats as writer and director and the actresses find their way into these revisions, changes that highlight tensions between gendered versions of events. The competing Deirdres of the Abbey and Yeats’s thousand pages of revisions show attempts to claim contested ground. The history of the play reveals tensions around ownership and representation as the women who inspired and performed the part revised Yeats’s initial vision and challenged Yeats’s idea of solitary, aristocratic ownership.

“She Set Me Writing My First Play”

Chapter 1 recovers the importance of Laura Armstrong to Yeats’s beginnings as a poet and dramatist. In his relationship with Armstrong, Yeats begins the pattern of needing a challenging woman to start writing and to imagine himself in the role of playwright. The tensions between the two in terms of class and power—Armstrong came from a more financially stable family—and the approaching date of Armstrong’s wedding to another gave rise to the now familiar death wish in Yeats’s work for her. Yeats wrote out his anxieties about his parents’ marriage, his mother’s illness and depression, and his insecurities in the face of Armstrong’s high-handedness in the creation of these early plays, and his work for Armstrong stands as an important precursor for his lifetime of fruitful writing out for women; Armstrong began the patterns that Yeats would follow in his years of work for Maud Gonne

A “Brutal” Deirdre

Molly Allgood helped Synge with Deirdre of the Sorrows, discussing drafts with him, performing scenes he was struggling to write, even as he neared death in his hospital room, and helping to access the draft from Synge’s family after his death. She then completed the draft with Yeats and Lady Gregory as she knew best what Synge wanted from the play, and performed in the premier. This chapter argues for the collaborative nature of this play and the importance of the dying and dead female body onstage, an embodiment that became more important to Synge as he neared death and as he grew closer to Molly. The chapter closes with a look at Molly Allgood’s death in poverty from a fire as part of the argument that who gets credit for writing plays has real-world consequences for the bodies of the women who performed. In other words, Molly Allgood suffered physically from that erasure

Epilogue—How Cathleen Became Mrs. Monihan

The Epilogue follows Sara Allgood’s history of performance and contributions to theatrical texts from her early days in Inghinidhe through her film work until her death in Hollywood in1950. What appears again and again in her American film work is an aging actress from Ireland translating stillness in the face of extremity in ways that strengthen even the smallest, sometimes nameless characters against the stereotype of the emotive Irish immigrant. From her earliest days in Inghinidhe, Allgood was part of a project to provide steadying images of Ireland against British melodrama and cartoons; her film work in America continued this work in nearly one hundred film roles. From her unpublished “Memories” and her surviving films, Sara Allgood emerges as a woman focused on creating theater and film, not simply taking direction. Her contribution to both mediums, a refusal to overact, and a gravity and stillness, educates the audience about what to expect of an Irish woman. Tracing the afterlife of her street theater and Abbey career into her later film work may restore some attention to a performer who developed the Abbey Stare for particular ends, revising established readings of both gender and nation in Ireland and America.