The Genius of The Irish Theater [antikvár]

V I the irish theater: an introduction In 1876, when a twenty-year-old Dublin clerk named Bernard Shaw decided to become a writer, he left Ireland—as had Congreve, Farquhar, Goldsmith, and Sheridan in earlier centuries—and settled in London. "My business in life," he later explained, "could not be transacted in Dublin. . . . Every Irishman who felt that his business in life was on the higher planes of the cultural professions felt that he must have a metropolitan domicile and an international culture: that is, he felt that his first business was to get out of Ireland." Although Dublin had had a theater as early as 1637, when Shaw left Ireland there still was nothing that could be called an Irish dramatic tradition. The theater of 1637 had been created not by Irish natives, but by English conquerors, and local authors with ambitions went to London to establish themselves as English writers. It was in London, in 1898, that an Anglo-Irishwoman, Lady Augusta Gregory, recorded in her diary a meeting with William Butler Yeats. "He is very full of playwriting. He . . . is very keen about taking or building a little theatre somewhere in the suburbs to produce romantic drama." Yeats, bom in Ireland, had collected Irish fairy tales, and though he was now living in London, he distrusted the metropolis and favored the Irish peasants, who were, he alleged, in close contact with the spiritual world. In 1890 he had been initiated into The Order of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, a Christian cabalistic society, and in 1894 he had written The Land of Heart's Desire, a play about an Irish girl who is carried off to an impossible "land where even the old are fau-." This slight play was staged in London in 1894, but Yeats's mind was fixed in Ireland; in 1891 he had founded the Irish Literary Society in London, and in the next year he 7