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  • Critiquing Cultures of Agonism:Games in Lady Gregory’s Plays and Translations
  • Jason Willwerscheid

When, in 1902, Lady Gregory published her first play, she was already widely perceived to be an old woman.1 In the course of that year, Gregory turned fifty; her husband had died more than a decade earlier, and she had subsequently cultivated an image of chaste widow in perpetual mourning. To most observers, her physical appearance suggested fidelity to a bygone era and a stubborn adherence to defunct traditions. When Gregory traveled to America in 1911, the newspapers frequently commented on her age; the New York Daily Tribune, for instance, asserted that “to hear her tell of the Irish players . . . is like reading from old books about the theatre.”2 Gregory, however, maintained that being an “old woman” was precisely what made her comic vision possible. As she explained to a reporter in Boston, “All the young writers are so busy writing tragedy that I shall have to go on [writing comedies], as I am the only one old enough to laugh.”3

Gregory’s comment deserves reflection. Only five years after she made her remark about being old enough to laugh, the history of Irish nationalism would arrive at a decisive turning point in the Easter Rising. As Gregory recognized, her allegiance to the comic muse positioned her at the margins of this historical development: only by being at a remove from the fray of combat could she manage to laugh. Gregory underlines her outsider status by linking her choice of genre not to her class, but to her age and, implicitly, to her gender, as in the first decades of the twentieth century, the dominant strain of Irish nationalist drama was decidedly masculinist. As Spivak points out, “old women” are [End Page 42] particularly well-placed to mock prevailing cultural norms—for instance, the figure of Baubo, who, according to Greek legend, was able to tease a laugh out of Demeter, despondent over the loss of a daughter, by exposing her “withered genitals.”4 No longer directly invested in histories of filiation, “old women” have the spectatorial distance required to view tragic scenes with a comic eye, to look upon history as play, as theater, as a game that plays itself out to its end.

Such an attitude can, no doubt, result in cynical impassivity or melancholic resignation. But it can also provide the distance necessary for critique. One of the primary targets of Gregory’s critique was agonism—that is to say, the idea that conflict, is a positive force in political life. Such thinking structured a range of Irish nationalisms: from Arthur Griffith’s militance to D. P. Moran’s notion of a “battle of two civilizations,” from Yeats’s poetics of apocalypse to Synge’s dramatic portrayals of traditional cultures besieged by modernity. Further, in staging her critique by way of games, Gregory was able to reflect self-critically upon her own position as spectatorial outsider with respect to the Irish Revival.

Her writings are saturated with games and play: in the mythologies, her characters play chess, checkers, backgammon, and hurling; in the plays, a card game or a horse race often constitutes a key plot device or an organizing motif. As Christopher Murray points out, Gregory’s games function throughout her works as a figure for the “play” of the theater itself, and especially that of the comic genre at which she excelled.5 It is important to note, however, that the specific types of games with which Gregory is most interested do not remain the same over time or across genre. In particular, a significant shift occurred around the end of 1902, a period when Gregory was nearing completion of an intense labor of translation (more than eight hundred pages in two-and-a-half years) and began to turn her attention to the stage. Already at this early point in her late-blooming literary career, Gregory’s dramatic worlds are constructed much differently from the worlds of the sagas. The Ireland of the sagas is a brutal universe in which bloody combat takes the place of any legal or civic framework; accordingly, its games are almost exclusively...

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