Modern Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr, Second Edition

7. Other Early-Modern Dramatists

76 Other Early-Modern Dramatists OF C OU R S E , other playwrights besides Lady Gregory, Yeats, Shaw, and Synge contributed to the growth, development, and success of the Irish drama before O’Casey. Outstanding among these dramatists were Padraic Colum, T. C. Murray, George Fitzmaurice, Lennox Robinson, and George Shiels. Of these early writers, Padraic Colum was the one who seemed most destined for greatness and perhaps literary immortality. PA DR A IC C OLU M (1881–1972) Padraic Colum liked to say that of all the Irish playwrights of his time, he was the only one who was Roman Catholic and peasant born. He also liked to say that he was born in the workhouse of Longford, which was technically true, but his father was master there. Colum’s mother was the daughter of a gardener. With a minimal education, Colum followed his father to Sandycove, County Dublin, to work as a railway clerk. Beginning to write poems and one-act plays, he came to the attention of Arthur Griffith , editor of The United Irishman and later the first president of the Irish Free State. Colum linked up with the Abbey as both playwright and actor. The three full-length plays he wrote between 1903 and 1910—Broken Soil (1903; revised and retitled The Fiddler ’s House for the 1907 revival), The Land (1905), and Thomas O T H E R E A R LY-MODE R N DR A M AT I S T S | 77 Muskerry (1910)—established him briefly as the Abbey’s most popular playwright. The brash young writer, who also had great initial success as a lyric poet with his first collection of poems, The Wild Earth (1907), quarreled with Yeats and the Abbey company, and despite Lady Gregory’s attempt to effect a reconciliation, he quit the company. In 1914, he left for America with his wife, Mary McGuire Colum, who in New York became one of America’s leading critics in the early twentieth century. Colum had no success as a playwright in New York, try as he would, but he continued to publish well-received and still revered volumes of poetry, folklore, and children’s books until his death in Connecticut just before his ninety-first birthday. One of his most popular nondramatic books is Our Friend James Joyce (1958), which he coauthored with his wife. Plays The Fiddler’s House (first titled Broken Soil, 1903; revised and revived, 1907) Conn Hourican is a middle-aged peasant farmer who has to choose between the romantic life of an itinerant musician and his obligation to his children and the land. The allegorical play pits Conn, the freedom-loving artist, against James Moynihan, the grasping son of a miserly father. Conn chooses the road, and his loving daughter, Maire, goes with him, but her lover, Brian, woos her back. The play’s strength is its authentic depiction of peasant characters. The Land (1905) Produced at the Abbey on 9 June 1905, just six months after the theater opened, The Land was the new theater’s first popular success —to some extent because it is about the Land War, which had fairly recently been concluded, and the passage of the Land Purchase Act, which allowed peasant farmers for the first time the opportunity 78 | PL A Y W R IG H T S A N D PL A Y S to purchase and own the land on which they and their families had worked for centuries. Two elderly farmers, Murtagh Cosgar and Martin Douras, try to keep their four children on the land by arranging two marriages between them. In the end, however, the bright couple leave to immigrate to America, and the good-hearted but dull couple remain to inherit the land. Colum is saying that, for many, land ownership came too late, and the best of the young were and are leaving. The lamented emigration of talented youth has remained a vital theme in Irish drama to the present. Thomas Muskerry (1910) Based on Colum’s recollection of life in the Longford workhouse his father administered, Thomas Muskerry is his only pure tragedy. It resembles King Lear in its portrayal of a workhouse master who in his retirement and old age is treated cruelly by his daughter, who in turn is mistreated by her daughter. Colum is showing how hardheartedness is passed on from generation to generation as well...