2 - Strangers in the house

Summary

bridget. What was it put you wandering?

old woman. Too many strangers in the house.

(Kathleen ni Houlihan)

‘The author of “Kathleen Ni Houlihan” appeals to you.’ So Yeats in 1907 sought to win over the hostile audience of anti-Playboy protesters at the Abbey by a reminder of his nationalist credentials. But was he the author of Kathleen ni Houlihan, and were the stirring emotions generated by that play his work? Now that it has been clearly established that Kathleen ni Houlihan was a fully collaborative work in which Gregory had no less a part than Yeats, traditional readings of it as reflecting his creativity, his aesthetics or politics, have to be seriously revised. But beyond that is the issue of what determines the political effect of a play such as Kathleen ni Houlihan, to what extent meaning is invested in the material from which the play is created, how far it is controlled by its author(s), or is a product of performance, audience, context. The political reaction to Synge's The Shadow of the Glen, staged just a year later, was as vehemently negative as the reaction to Kathleen ni Houlihan had been positive. Was it conceived as an ironic antidote to the idealising Kathleen, or were Synge's very different intentions wrested towards politics by the Dublin audiences and the nationalist press?