Lady Gregory's Toothbrush Read Online Free PDF

union movement to the landed gentry – remained stable. In the period between 1890 and 1925 every force changed and adapted.
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    L ike many others, including those with the benefit of greater hindsight, both Yeats and Lady Gregory misread the period after the fall of Parnell. In “Ireland After Parnell”, published in The Trembling of the Veil in 1922, Yeats wrote of “an intellectual movement at the first lull in politics … the sudden certainty that Ireland was to be like soft wax for years to come”. “After Parnell,” Lady Gregory wrote in 1911, “young men were no longer tied up in leagues and politics, their imagination called out for something more.” Yet any study of the committee of the Gaelic League or the Gaelic Athletic Association in any town in Ireland in these years makes clear that a good number of the young men would quickly emerge as more interested in politics, and indeed revolution, than in culture or sport. The soft wax quietly hardened, and this process was both helped and hindered in ways both knowing and unwittingby Yeats and Lady Gregory and their associates.
    At Coole in the summer of 1901, a year after she had determined to keep out of politics, Yeats told Lady Gregory of 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” who 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”. This woman would lead the young man of the house away from domestic happiness to join the French who had landed at Killala.
    It is now absolutely clear that the play that this dream became, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, though credited to Yeats, was written largely by Lady Gregory. The idea belonged to Yeats and Yeats wrote the chant of the old woman at the end. But he could not write peasant dialogue, and the play depends on the naturalistic setting, the talk of money and marriage, the sense of ease in family life in a smallholding. In the manuscript held in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, Lady Gregory has written in pencil on the first section of ten pages “All this mine alone”, and “This with WBY” at the beginning of the second section. James Pethica has described how Lady Gregory managed in the play to temper Yeats’s tendency “‘to symbolise rather than to represent life’ and grounded the development of the play within a realistic framework. Her emphasis on the emotional ties and hopes and dreams of the peasant family also invested Yeats’s political allegory with tragic force, by vividly realizing the well-being that Cathleen’s call destroys.”
    In her journal for 1922, Lady Gregory said that she wrote “all but all” of Cathleen Ni Houlihan . Lennox Robinson stated that “the verses in it are the poet’s, but all the homely dialogue is Lady Gregory’s. Indeed Yeats has told me more than once that the authorship of the play should be ascribed to her.” Willie Fay also reported that Lady Gregory had written all the play “except the part of Cathleen”.
    It is clear that Lady Gregory contributed “directly and abundantly”, in James Pethica’s phrase, to Yeats’s work for the theatre, especially to On Baile’s Strand , The Pot of Broth, The King’s Threshold and Deirdre. In his dedication of Where There Is Nothing to Lady Gregory in 1902, Yeats wrote: “I never did anything that went so easily and quickly, for when I hesitated, you had the right thought ready, and it was always you who gave the right turn to the phrase and gave it the ring of daily life. We finished several plays, of which this is the longest, in so few weeks, that if I were to say how few, I do not