The title Lady Lake is a familiar error for Lady Gregory in the popular memory of the Irish literary revival, and the slip is instructive: the figure of Augusta Gregory, the co-founder of the Abbey Theatre and the great translator-adapter of the older Irish heroic tales, is so closely associated with the lakes and landscapes of the west of Ireland that her name almost merges with the Celtic mythology she helped to recover. The story of the Irish literary revival, with Lady Gregory at its centre alongside W. B. Yeats and the other figures of the Irish Renaissance, is the most celebrated chapter in the Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and one of the most consequential in the Celtic legacy today.
The Background to the Revival
The Irish literary revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries grew out of a broader movement of Irish cultural nationalism that had been developing since the 1840s. The Great Famine of 1845-1849 had devastated the Irish-speaking countryside, and the political failure of the various Irish movements in the nineteenth century had produced a sense that the cultural recovery of Ireland would have to precede its political independence. The Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill, was the major institutional expression of the language recovery, and the Irish Literary Society, founded in London in 1891, was the centre of the English-language wing.
The cultural work of the revival built on the scholarly achievements of the earlier nineteenth-century Irish scholars, including Eugene O’Curry and John O’Donovan, who had begun the systematic editing and translation of the older Irish manuscripts. The medieval Irish literature was now available in printed editions, and the tales of the Fenian cycle and the Ulster cycle were accessible to a wider audience than at any time since the middle ages.
Augusta Gregory and Coole Park
Augusta Gregory, née Persse, was the daughter of a Galway landlord, and her family home at Coole Park in County Galway became the centre of the literary revival in the west of Ireland. Yeats, who was a particular friend of Lady Gregory, wrote several of his major poems at Coole Park, and the Wild Swans at Coole of 1917 is one of the best-known poems of the modern Irish tradition.
Lady Gregory’s literary work was substantial. Her translations and adaptations of the older Irish heroic tales, including Cuchulain of Muirthemne of 1902 and Gods and Fighting Men of 1904, made the tales of the Ulster cycle available to a wide English-speaking audience. Her work has been criticised in some scholarly quarters for the liberties it took with the originals, but the translations captured the spirit of the older tales in a way that the more scholarly translations of O’Curry had not been able to do for the general reader.
Her plays, including Spreading the News, Hyacinth Halvey, and The Rising of the Moon, were central to the repertoire of the Abbey Theatre. Her work as a folklorist and as a collector of the local stories of the west of Ireland was also substantial, and her book Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland of 1920 is a major document of the Irish oral tradition.
Yeats and the Founding of the Abbey Theatre
W. B. Yeats was the central figure of the Irish literary revival, and the Abbey Theatre, which he co-founded with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn in 1904, was the major institutional expression of the movement. The Abbey Theatre was the first state-subsidised theatre in the English-speaking world, and it became the home of a distinctive new Irish drama that drew on the older Irish literary tradition. The opening of the Abbey Theatre on 27 December 1904, with plays by Yeats and Lady Gregory, was a major cultural event.
The plays performed in the early years included Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan of 1902, with Maud Gonne in the title role, and the controversial Playboy of the Western World of 1907 by J. M. Synge, which provoked riots in the theatre because of its frank treatment of rural Irish subjects. The Plays for an Irish Theatre series, edited by Yeats, was the major published record of the early repertoire.
The political effect of the revival was substantial. The cultural programme of the revival was a major element in the formation of the Irish nationalism that produced the Easter Rising of 1916 and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. The revivalists themselves were divided on the question of political nationalism: Yeats was a Unionist for much of his life, and Lady Gregory’s politics were conservative. But the cultural work of the revival provided the intellectual and emotional framework within which the later political movement would develop.
Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League
Douglas Hyde, the founder of the Gaelic League and later the first President of Ireland, was a major figure in the language side of the revival. Hyde’s Love Songs of Connacht of 1893 and his Literary History of Ireland of 1899 were major contributions to the recovery of the Irish literary tradition, and his election as the first President of Ireland in 1938 was the symbolic recognition of the cultural work of the revival by the new Irish state. The Gaelic League, with branches throughout Ireland and abroad, was a substantial institution, but the moderate cultural nationalism of Hyde came into conflict with the more politically engaged republicanism of figures like Patrick Pearse, and the League gradually lost its central role in Irish cultural life in the early twentieth century.
J. M. Synge and the New Irish Drama
J. M. Synge, the author of The Playboy of the Western World, was one of the major figures of the Abbey Theatre. His plays, including The Shadow of the Glen of 1903, Riders to the Sea of 1904, and The Tinker’s Wedding of 1907, were central to the repertoire, and his prose work The Aran Islands of 1907 was a major document of the Irish folk tradition.
The riots that accompanied the first performance of The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 were a sign of the contested cultural politics of the period. The defenders of Synge, including Yeats and Lady Gregory, argued that the truth of the rural Irish experience required an unflinching treatment, and the controversy was an important moment in the development of the modern Irish drama.
The revival also extended well beyond the literary establishment. The visual arts of the period, including the painting of Jack B. Yeats and the stained-glass of Harry Clarke, were a major part of the achievement. The political thought of figures like Pádraig Pearse was deeply informed by the cultural programme of the revival. The Irish language movement and the broader cultural institutions of the new Irish state were all, in substantial part, products of the revival, and the critical debate about the revival’s romanticised image of the Irish past has continued to this day.
Conclusion
The Irish literary revival, with Lady Gregory and Yeats at its centre, is the most celebrated chapter in the Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and one of the most consequential in the Celtic legacy today. The revival rediscovered the older Irish literary tradition, gave it a modern literary form, and laid the cultural foundations for the Irish Free State. Whatever the view of the achievements and the limitations of the revival, it is a defining moment in the modern cultural history of the British Isles.
Related Topics
- The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the broader context of the Irish literary revival.
- The Celtic identity in modern nations is, in the Irish case, substantially a product of the revival.
- The Celtic mythology and the heroic tales of the older Irish tradition are the source for much of the revival’s literary material.
- The Celtic languages and oral tradition are central to the language side of the revival, with the Gaelic League as the major institution.
- The Celtic influence on fantasy and popular culture is, in substantial part, a descendant of the literary work of the revival.