Douglas Hyde's "Share" in The Unicorn from the Stars

DOUGLAS HYDE'S uSHARE" IN THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS ON FEBRUARY 12, 1908, W. B. Yeats wrote to A. H. Bullen refusing to allow the latter to include Where There Is Nothing in the Collected Edition of Yeats's works for the following reason: Though The Unicorn is almost altogether Lady Gregory's writing it has far more of my spirit in it than Where there is Nothing which she and I and Douglas Hyde wrote in a fortnight to keep George Moore from stealing the plot. Hyde forbade me to mention his name for fear of consequences, and you must not mention it even now....1 Not until this letter was published by Wade in 1954 did Hyde's share in the first version of The Unicorn from the Stars become generally known. As late as 1936, three years after Moore's death, when all danger of his bringing a lawsuit had consequently disappeared, the malicious and delicious account of the Yeats-Moore quarrel in Dramatis Personae referred to Hyde only as "a certain cautious friend, whose name must be left out of this narrative...."2 Since Yeats predeceased Hyde by many years, this is how the passage still stands in the Autobiography .a I assume that Hyde was less afraid of Moore's taste for litigation than he was of offending the Roman Catholic clergy and laity of Ireland. Where There Is Nothing contains much that they would regard as blasphemous and heretical. If Yeats had revealed Hyde's share in it even in 1936, I wonder whether Hyde could have been elected President of Ireland in 1938. In view of Yeats's statement about the authorship ot The Unicorn from the Stars (the revised version of Where There Is Nothing), I was surprised, during a recent rereading of the play, to recognize several passages of dialogue between the beggars; the prose seemed to follow very closely the spirit if not the letter of a Hyde translation with which I had just finished working. Not having ever read Where There Is Nothing, I assumed that these passages had survived intact from the earlier play, which I then, naturally, sought out and 1 The Letters 0/ W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London. 1954). p. 503. 2 W. B. Yeats. Dramatis Personae • •. (New York. 1936), p. 76. a The Autobiography 0/ William Butler Yeats (New York. 1938). p•.387; paperback ed. (New York. 1958). p. 304. 463 464 MODERN DRAMA February read.' To my surprise, I made three discoveries: first, that Where There Is Nothing, especially in the first three of its five acts, is a better play than Yeats's opinion of it and the circumstances of its composition would suggest; second, that it is so greatly different from The Unicorn from the Stars as to demand republication in its own right; third, that not a phrase of my supposed "Hyde passages" occurs in the earlier play. The passages I refer to will be found in the Collected Plays# new edition (New York, 1953), as follows: The quarrel between Nanny and her bastard son, Johnny Bocach, pp. 228'9· A speech by Johnny to Nanny on p. 238, "The day you go to Heaven that you may never come back alive out of itl But it is not yourself will ever hear the saints hammering at their musicsl" Nanny's speech at the top of p. 240 (which also recalls Synge's Tinker's Wedding), "I tell you, if you brought him tied in a bag he would not sayan Our Father for you, without you having a half-crown at the top of your fingers." Parallels to all of these passages are to be found in Hyde's translation of a ribald Gaelic poem,