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think anybody would believe me.”
    Although Yeats gave Lady Gregory some public credit for this collaboration, he never acknowledged the extent of her work on Cathleen Ni Houlihan. In a diary entry in 1925Lady Gregory complained that his failure to credit her as co-author was “rather hard on me”. Elizabeth Coxhead, in her literary portrait of Lady Gregory, wrote that “when her family … urged her to stake her claim, she always refused with a smile, saying that she could not take from [Yeats] any part of what had proved, after all, his one real popular success”.
    The play was performed with George Russell’s play Deirdre in Dublin in April 1902, with Maud Gonne playing Cathleen. Lady Gregory, according to Roy Foster, attended one rehearsal and “slipped away to Venice well before the first night”. Yeats, in an interview with the United Irishman, said that his subject was “Ireland and its struggle for independence ”. “Apparently,” Roy Foster wrote, “neither of them anticipated the response to their joint production.” The hall was packed every night, and the effect of the play was powerful. It was short and stark, with no sub-plots or stylized dialogue until Cathleen herself appeared, and its message was clear: that young men would have to give up everything for Ireland. The audience and the ordinary people on the stage were as one, and both were visited by this haunting force, a woman both old and young, who would pull them towards heroism and away from everyday materialism . The critic Stephen Gwynn attended the performance and wrote: “I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one was prepared for people togo out to shoot and be shot … Yeats was not alone responsible; no doubt but Lady Gregory helped him to get the peasant speech so perfect; but above all Miss Gonne’s impersonation had stirred the audience as I have never seen another audience stirred … Yeats has said somewhere that his defect as a dramatist is that normal men do not interest him; but here in one brief theme he had expressed what a hundred others have tried to do, the very spirit of a race forever defeated and for ever insurgent against defeat. He had linked this expression with a perfectly normal household group.”
    George Bernard Shaw later said that it was a play “which might lead a man to do something foolish”. By 1904, Yeats was ready to deny that “it was a political play of a propaganda kind”, but he was not convincing. Many years later, he would wonder “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”.
    It can be argued that one of the main reasons why Lady Gregory did not want to claim co-authorship was her own ambiguous relationship with this material: she kept her friends in England, she remained a landlord, she did not wish to be connected directly with the emotional call for action that Cathleen Ni Houlihan and indeed Maud Gonne proposed. But her own restraint, once she was away from Coole and her role as a landlord, was always open to other forces. She wanted and generally managed both to belandlord and also to write stirringly about rebellion, although she made sure that her rebels’ political ambitions were vague. Fortunately, her rebels never wanted land. Two other one-act plays to which she gave her name as author, Gaol Gate and The Rising of the Moon, both produced and published over the next few years, made no bones about her support for rebellion. Lennox Robinson wrote that Cathleen Ni Houlihan and The Rising of the Moon “made more rebels in Ireland than a thousand political speeches or a hundred reasoned books”.
    How she managed her two separate worlds in these years is a mystery, but she managed superbly. In these same years, she could write Yeats a description of a dance at Coole: “Our dance last night went off splendidly, lasted till three o’clock this