General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

Edited and with a Foreword by Ann Saddlemyer

22.2 x 14.00  cm.  

This volume of Lady Gregory’s Collected Plays contains all those that deal with the magic of Irish folk stories or the supernatural aspects of ghosts or religion. Those which use as their plot magic and kings' sons were written for an audience of children. In The Dragon the theatrical monster is to come and carry off the princess as all good dragons should and then be killed by a prince, but in this case the disguised prince does not kill the beast but does a transplant giving him a squirrel's heart which makes him chase off to the West Indies in search of cocoa-nuts.

For her adult audiences, Lady Gregory wrote her Irish passion play, The Story Brought by Brigit, and Shanwalla, a play about the drugging of a prize racehorse just before a race. The innocence of the accused trainer is only proved after the appearance of the ghost of the trainer's murdered wife who sup­plies particularly relevant informa­tion which shakes the villain into a confession. The third act of this play was not as good as it might have been, and after Yeats had criticised it Lady Gregory rewrote the first part, published here for the first time. The original act, together with Yeats' criticisms, are included in an Appendix. The other plays in this volume are what Lady Gregory called her “first play”, Colman & Guaire; her beautiful miracle play set in the West of Ireland, The Travelling Man; The Full Moon; Aristotle's Bellows and Dave.

Volume I of the Collected Plays contains the Comedies; Volume II The Tragedies and Tragic-Comedies, and Volume IV the Translations, Adaptations and Collaborations. Each volume is edited and has a foreword by Professor Saddlemyer.

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Chosen and Introduced by Robert O'Driscoll

The twelfth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Paperback ISBN; 0-86140-149-2 / 978-86140-149-9  10.50

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: The King of Friday's Men, The Paddy Pedlar, The Wood of the Whispering, Daughter from over the Water, Petticoat Loose and the previously unpublished The Bachelor's Daughter, bibliographical checklist.

Michael Joseph Molloy (1917-1994) was born and died in Milltown, Co. Galway. Originally intending to enter the priesthood, this was prevented by his being struck down by tuberculosis, and it was during the long periods he spent in hospital that he started writing plays, having been inspired by a childhood visit to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. His first play, Old Road, was produced at the Abbey in 1943, as was The Visiting House in 1946, and The King of Friday’s Men in 1948. When the old theatre burned down and the company moved to the Queen’s Theatre his The Wood of the Whispering and The Paddy Pedlar were produced there in 1953, followed by The Will and the Way in 1955, The Right Rose Tree in 1958, and The Wooing of Duvesa in 1964.

After the company’s return to the rebuilt Theatre in 1966 his plays – with their romantic plots and Syngean dialogue – did not find favour with the new Abbey, and with the exception of Petticoat Loose in 1979, none of his later works were performed professionally.  By the late 1980s he had come to believe – as he wrote in one letter to the publisher of this selection – that the Abbey  no longer even read plays by authors based in the provinces until they had been produced elsewhere (here he cited himself and John B.Keane as examples), and that his works scared the ‘actor Artistic Directors who know nothing about provincial Ireland and nothing about the rules of playwriting’.  He feared his plays might be the last full-length folk plays written in Ireland.

Robert O'Driscoll, an authority on Samuel Ferguson and on the early works of W. B. Yeats, was Professor of English Literature at St Michael's College, University of Toronto, until his retirememt. He died in 1996.

Chosen and Introduced by Wolfgang Zach

The thirteenth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-293-6 / 978-0-86140-293-9 £8.95

21.6 x 13.8 cm

Contains: The Turn of the Road, The Drone, Red Turf, The Troth, Phantoms, Bridgehead and Peter, bibliographical checklist.
Note. Although the two articles ‘The Ulster Literary Theatre’ and ‘Meet Rutherford Mayne’ were announced as being part of this volume they were, for reasons the publisher is unable to explain, omitted from the published book. They can now be read  HERE

Samuel John Waddell (1878-1967), who took on the stage-name Rutherford Mayne when he embarked on a theatrical career, was the most prolific, versatile, and successful playwright that the Irish Literary Revival in Ulster brought forth. In the course of his career as a dramatist, from 1906 to 1934, he wrote thirteen plays – ten plays for the Ulster Literary Theatre, one for the Dublin-based Theatre of Ireland, and two for the Abbey Theatre. Especially his early realistic Ulster 'peasant plays' were very successful, among them The Drone (1908), the most popular Irish folk comedy of the first half of the twentieth century. He also acted a great number of main parts in plays of his own and of other writers, to great acclaim, mainly in Belfast and Dublin but also on tours to England and Scotland, from 1904 onwards until late in his life. His plays disappeared from the stage in the 1950s and when he died at the age of 89, in 1967, his artistic achievements were almost forgotten.

In this selection of Rutherford Mayne's plays, seven of his eight published plays – his most important ones – have been included, The Turn of the Road, The Drone , The Troth, Red Turf, Phantoms, Peter and Bridge Head. Two important prose pieces (one of Mayne's essays and an interview), have been added to the plays as they provide direct insight into his personality, views, and career.

Wolfgang Zach’s introduction shows why the plays should be remembered today, providing a lengthy survey of Mayne's life and works, with particular emphasis on a discussion of all his plays, their critical reception, stage history, and specific features.

Wolfgang Zach was Professor of English (Chair) at the University of Innsbruck and Head of its English Department. Before his appointment to this present position in 1994/95, he taught at the University of Graz and also was a Visiting Professor at a great number of universities in each continent. From his Ph.D. thesis on Oliver Goldsmith (1969) onwards he has published widely in the field of Irish literature and was a Vice-President of IASIL (the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures). He hosted an IASIL-Conference and edited its proceedings (with H. Kosok) on Literary Interrelations. Ireland, England and the World, 3 vols. (Tubingen: Narr, 1987), his most recent volume (ed. with R. Freiburg and A. Löffler) is on Swift: The Enigmatic Dean (Tübingen:Stauffenburg, 1998), and for many years he has been active as European Continental Editor of the Irish Literary Supplement.

Chosen and Introduced by John Barrett

The eleventh volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Hardcopy ISBN: 0-86140-154-9 / 978-0-86140-154-3 £30.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-155-7 / 978-0-86140-155-0 £9.95

Contains: Where Stars Walk, Ill Met by Moonlight, The Mountains Look Different, The Liar, Prelude in Kasbek Street, selected writings on plays and players, bibliographical checklist.

When he died in 1978, Ireland mourned the passing of the most versatile man of the theatre she has ever known. His acting career started early as a child actor in London, but when he was fourteen he read a single passage of Yeats extolling Ireland's heritage and from then on he was to give himself to the Dublin stage, notably the Gate Theatre which he founded with his partner, Hilton Edwards. John Barrett has mapped out the influences and achievements of this extraordinary character in his introduction and selected five of Macliamm¢ir's most memorable works.

John Barrett taught English at University College, Dublin.

Chosen and Introduced by S.F.Gallagher

The ninth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-140-9 / 978-0-86140-140-6 £35.00
Papercover ISBN: 00-86140-141-7 / 978-0-86140-141-3 £10.95

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: The Au Pair Man, The Patrick Pearse Motel, Da, Summer, A Life, Kill, Bibliographical Checklist.

`Hugh Leonard' is the pen-name of John Keyes Byrne. He is, as Christopher Fitz-Simon has written, `the most prolific and most technically assured of modern Irish playwrights', and his cosmopolitanism is shown by the range of his work, twenty-five plays (eighteen of which have been published), and seven adaptations of others' work for stage, something like thirty individual plays for television, work for over forty TV series totalling well in excess of 120 original episodes, and over 100 episodes for serials based on others' works (Emily Bronte, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Somerville & Ross, for example), as well as over a dozen film scripts. The output is truly phenomenal.

Although a constant contributor to television, it is for the theatre that he has produced his finest work. This selection amply illustrates Leonard's cosmopolitan talent and his constant ability to entertain his audience.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 19

O’Casey, the Dramatist is the first study to analyse each of Sean O’Casey’s plays in the context of the whole body of his work. His first plays were performed by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin until it refused The Silver Tassie, a rejection that brought about a most acrimonious debate, broke up friendships, and caused O’Casey to sever his links with the Abbey. Its directors were unable to understand the first of his experimental plays, and could not appreciate its true quality. Thence­forth O'Casey’s writing developed along new lines, mostly away from his Irish roots.

In popular estimation his best plays are those of the Dublin years – The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars – but many of his later works are greatly undervalued; indeed The Silver Tassie, Within the Gates, Purple Dust, Red Roses for Me, Hall of Healing, Cock-a-doodle Dandy and The Bishop's Bonfire are all masterpieces of modern drama, as this study shows.

Professor Kosok considers all the twenty-three extant plays, tracing O'Casey's development as a playwright through a chronological study and show­ing that his work can be divided into five periods, which are considered in this volume under the headings ‘Dublin as a Mirror of the World’, 'Experiments’, ‘Ideology and Drama', ‘Ireland as a Microcosm', and ‘Bitterness and Recon­ciliation’. He ends this study with a section headed ‘Continuity and Originality' in which he briefly summarises the findings of previous scholarship, suggests some additional answers to general problems, and indicates some avenues for future research.

Chosen and Introduced by Joseph Ronsley

The second volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-123-9 / 978-0-86140-123-9 £30.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-086-0 / 978-0-86140-086-7 £9.95

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: The Old Lady Says 'No! (with Curtis Canfield's list of titles and authors of poems used in its Prologue)', The Moon in the Yellow River, The Golden Cuckoo, The Dreaming Dust, The Scythe and the Sunset, bibliographical checklist.

Denis Johnston's first play, The Old Lady Says 'No!', was produced in 1929, and immediately made his reputation as a very talented, innovative and deeply thoughtful playwright. This description was confirmed by his later plays, four of which, The Moon in the Yellow River, The Golden Cuckoo, The Dreaming Dust, and The Scythe and the Sunset, with The Old Lady, are printed in this volume. Written in widely varying styles, Johnston's work presents his audience with issues that initially seem clear-cut, but by the end of each play there have been thought through to such an extent that basic assumptions have been thoroughly reorganised and transformed.

At the time of publication of this selection in 1983 Denis Johnston (1901-84) was justly considered to be the doyen of Ireland's dramatists. Chosen and introduced by Joseph Ronsley, this selection is the ideal introduction to Johnston's work, for use by classes and performers alike.

Joseph Ronsley taught at McGill University, Montreal. He is author of Yeats's Autobiography: Life as Symbolic Pattern, and has edited Myth and Reality in Irish Literature, and Denis Johnston, a Retrospective. He is co-general editor of the Irish Drama Selections series, and has been a President of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies.

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Christine St Peter

ISBN: 978-0-86140-357-8

21.6 x 13.8 cm.   xiv, 140 pp.   1992

This definitive edition is based on Johnston's final 1977 version published in the Dramatic Works, the product of fifty years of revisions, and situates the play in its historical, theatrical, and biographical contexts. It is the first edition to have reference to all private and archival materials and to have had the assistance of the playwright in the preparation of its critical apparatus, which includes comprehensive annotations and analyses of all substantive changes in the multiple manuscripts. It will be of enduring interest to scholars specializing in Irish and European theatre history, as well as to students of Anglo-Irish literature and theatre directors.

Co-published with the Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C.

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hardback ISBN: 0-86140-080-1 / 978-0-86140-080-5 £35.00
three-quarter leather signed edition limited to 25 copies
ISBN: 0-86140-081-X / 978-0-86140-081-2 £150.00

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      516 pp.   1992
Volume 3 of the Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston

Edited by Joseph Ronsley

Publication of the third volume completes the collection of Johnston's work. Volume 3, The Radio and Television Plays, is in many ways the most interesting, not least because Johnston was one of the founding fathers of BBC drama and a major influence on viewers' very perception of what a television play consists of. Also printed in this collection are a number of articles and other prose writings about drama on radio and television. After a very happy pre-war period working for BBC Radio Northern Ireland, he moved to the embryonic television service at Alexandra Palace - he was one of the few to have been temporarily thrown out of television when broadcasting ceased for the duration of hostilities and he became a BBC Radio War Reporter. An interesting feature of the TV scripts is the early development of television script-writing technique, which, as these faithful reproductions from extant typescripts show, grew out of the conventions used in play-scripts.

Contents: 

Radio Plays: Lillibulero, Multiple Studio Blues, Great Parliamentarians: Lord Palmerston, High Command, The Gorgeous Lady Blessington, Amanda McKittrick Ros, In the Train;
Television Drama: The Parnell Commission, Weep for the Cyclops, The Call to Arms, Operations at Killyfaddy, Murder Hath No Tongue;
Essays on Broadcasting; Reviews; Appendices: Blind Man's Buff, Riders to the Sidhe; A Radio Talk.

ISBN: 978-0-901072-53-5

21.6 x 13.8 cm.     iv, 404 pp.    1979      Volume 2 of the Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston

Contains: A Bride for the Unicorn, The Moon in the Yellow River, A Fourth for Bridge, The Golden Cuckoo, Nine Rivers from Jordan, The Tain (a pageant), and 'Introducing the enigmatic Dean Swift'.

ISBN: 978-0-901072-52-8
12.6 x 13.8 cm.      iv, 395 pp.   1977   Volume 1 of the Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston

Containing: General Introduction,  The Old Lady Says `No!' and 'A Note on what happened', The Scythe and the Sunset, Storm Song, The Dreaming Dust, 'Strange Occurrence on Ireland's Eye' and accompanying prose writings about these plays.

Chosen and Introduced by Janet Egleson Dunleavy and Gareth Dunleavy

The seventh volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-095-X / 987-0-86140-095-9 £25.00

Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-096-8 / 978-0-86140-096-6 £8.99

21.6 x 13.8 cm    192 pp.   1991

Contains: The Twisting of the Rope, The Marriage, The Lost Saint, The Nativity, King James, The Bursting of the Bubble, The Tinker and the Sheeog, The Matchmaking, The School-master, bibliographical checklist. This volume publishes the original Irish language texts with Lady Gregory's translations.

When Douglas Hyde was elected in 1938 as first President of Ireland, he brought to this last of many rôles the prestige of an important scholar, a noted author and a leader of the cultural nationalist movement. Born in 1860, the son of the Church of Ireland rector at Frenchpark, Co. Roscommon, he grew up among the local people, learning Irish and listening  to folk tales, which he began to record and which proved valuable experience when writing dialogue for his plays. After study at Trinity he became a founder member of the Gaelic League, formed in 1893 to preserve and promote the Irish language, and he was its President for twenty-two years.

Hyde was struck by the idea of promoting the Irish language through drama, especially puppet shows and short plays. In the hands of a writer less gifted in mimicry, with a less-developed sense of humour, the results of an effort undertaken for admittedly propagandist purposes might have been deadly. In his hands they ushered in a new dramatic tradition. That his one-act plays, classics of the modern Irish theatre, continue to be performed today, both in their original Irish and in Lady Gregory's English translations is but one indication of the versatility of his talent and his appeal to both popular and artistic tastes. Eight one-act plays are reproduced here with Lady Gregory's translations on the facing pages.

More than three decades after his death, the inevitable reassessment is under way and new stock must be taken of his rôles as folklorist, poet, translator and playwright, each assumed at a carefully chosen time for what it could contribute to the goal of his life: first the cultural, then the social and political independence of Ireland.

Chosen and Introduced by David B. Eakin and Michael Case

The eighth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Hardcover ISBN:0-86140-144-1 / 978-0-86140-144-4 £35.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-145-X / 978-0-86140-145-1 £9.95

21.6 x 13.8  cm.

Contains:  George Moore's The Strike at Arlingford, The Bending of the Bough, The Coming of Gabrielle, The Passing of the Essenes; and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field, Maeve, The Tale of a Town, bibliographical checklist.

GEORGE MOORE is best known as a master of English prose, but he also wrote plays, usually in collaboration with other authors, and occasionally based on or on the precursors of his own novels, the best known of which are probably Diarmuid and Grania (with W.B.Yeats), The Strike at Arlingford, and The Bending of the Bough (based on Edward Martyn's The Tale of a Town). Apart from the last two, this selection also contains Moore's The Coming of Gabrielle and The Passing of the Essenes.

EDWARD MARTYN was, with W.B.Yeats and Lady Gregory, a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre, the second production of which, opening on 9 May 1899, the day after Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, was his The Heather Field. Apart from this play, the present volume also contains Maeve and The Tale of a Town.

As well as the introduction by David B. Eakin and Michael Case, there are also bibliographical checklists of Moore's and Martyn's works.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T.R.Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

Edited and with a foreword by Ann Saddlemyer

22.2 x 14.0 cm.     
 

Although Lady Gregory's first plays were comedies, she preferred writing tragedies which she found easier. As Ann Saddlemyer writes in her foreword to this volume: "In the tragic form, with the character of comedy deliberately left out, one could celebrate strength where 'fate itself is the protagonist'. 'You may let your hero kick or struggle, but he is in the claws all the time.' "

Lady Gregory wrote five traged­ies, The Gaol Gate, Dervorgilla, Grania, McDonough's Wife and Kincora. Kincora gave her the most trouble in writing, perhaps because, as she herself thought ‘I kept too close to history’', and she had to ask Yeats and Synge for their help. It exists in two versions, the first of which appears in the Appendix of this volume.

This volume also contains the Tragic-Comedies, The White Cock­ade, The Canavans, The Image (which with The Gaol Gate was her favourite) and The Deliverer, the only bitter play Lady Gregory ever wrote.

Volume I of the Collected Plays contains the Comedies, Volume III, Wonder and the Supernatural, and Volume IV, Translations, Adapta­tions and Collaborations. Each volume is edited and has a fore­word by Professor Saddlemyer.

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Chosen and Introduced by Mary FitzGerald

The third volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

Hardcover ISBN: 0-86140-099-2 / 978-0-86140-99-7 £25.00
Paperback ISBN: 0-86140-100-X / 978-0-86140-100-0 £9.99
21.6 x 13.8 cm. 379 pp. 1983

Contains: The Travelling Man, Spreading the News, Kincora, Hyacinth Halvey, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, The Gaol Gate, The Rising of the Moon, Dervorgilla, The Workhouse Ward, Grania, The Golden Apple, The Story Brought by Brigit, Dave, Lady Gregory on playwriting and her plays, bibliographical checklist.

Lady Gregory wrote her first play when she was forty-nine years old. Apart from her collaborations with W. B. Yeats and others, and translated adaptations, she produced thirty-nine plays, while devoting a great deal of time to the management of the Abbey Theatre, and the Lane Pictures.

Described with admiration by Bernard Shaw as the Irish Molière, she contributed plays in every genre – comedies, tragedies, tragic-comedies, wonder and supernatural plays - and for every audience, most effectively in the one act form.

This collection of thirteen plays, and her writings about them, is intended to show the breadth of her playwriting abilities, and her thoughts on the plays and their creation. Chosen, with an introduction, by Mary FitzGerald, this third volume in the Irish Literary Studies series has a bibliographical checklist by Colin Smythe.

Mary FitzGerald gained her PhD from Princeton University for work on Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, and taught at Fordham University before taking up her appointment at the University of New Orleans. She was Review Editor of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies.

General Editors of the Coole Edition: T. R. Henn CBE and Colin Smythe

With a Foreword by T. R. Henn

ISBN: 978-0-900675-35-5

Studies and Translations from the Irish, including nine plays by Douglas Hyde

22.7 x 13.8 cm.  286 pp.    illus.  1974   Volume 11 of the Coole Edition of Lady Gregory's works

In Poets and Dreamers Lady Gregory has gathered together a number of essays and translations she had made from the Irish of Douglas Hyde, An Craoibhin Aoibhinn, ‘the Sweet Little Branch’, who was founder and President of the Gaelic League at the time and later to be the first President of the Republic of Ireland.

Lady Gregory has also written about other poets in this volume, notably Raftery, who was the model for Yeats’s Red Hanrahan, and also writes about West Irish ballads, and those by Jacobite and Boer and that beautiful poem by the expatriate Shemus Cartan, ‘A Sorrowful Lament for Ireland’.

Her other essays are covered by the Dreamers part of the title, ‘Mountain Theology’, ‘Herb Healing’ and ‘Workhouse Dreams’ among them. This edition contains a further five plays by Hyde, translated by Lady Gregory, three of which have not hitherto been published.

The Ap­pendices contain a number of early versions of poems and articles and includes ‘Dreams that have no moral’ by W. B. Yeats. This has been added from his Celtic Twilight (1902) as an Appendix in order to give an example as to how Lady Gregory worked together with him in providing him with material for his volumes. Lady Gregory refers to the story in ‘Workhouse Dreams’.

The Editors have also added a quant­ity of her revisions and an essay, ‘Cures by Charms’, which first appeared in the Westminster Budget with two of the other essays in this volume, but which was not included in the first edition.

Collected, edited and annotated by A. Norman Jeffares

23.5 x 15.5 cm.     xxxii, 861 pp.  2001
ISBN: 978-0-86140-404-9

Poems and Plays brings together the contents of Oliver St John Gogarty’s fifteen volumes of poetry, including his Collected Poems. It also contains poems published individually in various journals and 232 hitherto unpublished poems; as well, there are his three Abbey plays – Blight, A Serious Thing and The Enchanted Trousers – published under the nom-de-plume Gideon Ouseley, together with Incurables and the incomplete Wavelengths.

Much of Gogarty’s poetry was classically inspired; his witty lyric poems have the elegant grace of Herrick or the terse eloquence of Marvell. His appreciative poems about his friends and his elegies for some of them are balanced by Martial-like satires; his enthusiastic enjoyment of beauty is matched by the encomiastic treatment of places, itself reinforced by a keen awareness of their historical and often dramatic associations.

Gogarty, the son and grandson of doctors, was born in Dublin in 1878. His novel, Tumbling in the Hay (1939; 1996) gives a sparkling account of medical student life in Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. When he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, Gogarty was befriended by the famous classical dons Tyrrell and Mahaffy and the philosopher Macran. At the same time he had a circle of contemporaries (many met earlier when he was briefly a student at University College, Dublin) known for their raffish behaviour and mocking, bawdy wit; among them were James Joyce, John (‘Citizen’) Elwood and Vincent Cosgrave. James Starkey (‘Seumas O’Sullivan’) was another contemporary companion. And Gogarty’s acquaintanceship widened to include George Moore and W.B.Yeats who, despite thirteen years difference in age, became a lifelong friend.

An all-round athlete who was a champion cyclist, who successfully rescued drowning men on three occasions, Gogarty followed up his medical degree with a spell of study in Vienna, returning to become a successful Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist in Dublin. His lively autobiographical As I was going down Sackville Street (1937; 1994) records something of the entertaining eccentricity of many of the city’s citizens in the 1920s as well as the characters of those involved in its cultural and political life.

Gogarty’s wit irradiated his exuberant conversation. Many of his Rabelaisian poems have remained unpublished until now. They circulated freely, however, in the talk of Dublin, especially among the group who met in Fanning’s public house or the Bailey, such fellow wits as George Redding and Neil Montgomery.

Gogarty, whose politically active friends included Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and Michael Cusack, became a Senator of the Irish Free State. Kidnapped by the I.R.A. in the Irish Civil War in 1923, he escaped being shot by plunging into the River Liffey and swimming downstream to safety. Renvyle, his large house in Connemara, bought when he realised that cars made it more accessible from Dublin (he was an enthusiastic early motorist and Ireland’s first amateur aviator) was burnt down by the I.R.A. shortly afterwards. When it was rebuilt in 1930 Gogarty turned it into a hotel. There, as in Dublin, he and his wife entertained generously, their circle of friends ever-widening.

As he moved away from medicine Gogarty sold his Dublin house, 15 Ely Place, finding more time for writing in Connemara. In 1939 he went on a lecture tour in the United States and, disillusioned by de Valera’s Ireland, stayed on, supporting himself and his family (there were two sons and a daughter) in Ireland, by writing and lecturing. He came back at intervals, transport permitting, but died in New York in 1957, the year that he had decided to return permanently to Ireland.

Now that his work is being made available again, readers have the opportunity to appreciate the lively evocative writings of this Renaissance man whose poetry W.B.Yeats so admired, including more of Gogarty’s work in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935 than of any other living poet. His poetry conveys his infective love of beauty of all kinds, the fundamental seriousness beneath his witty persiflage, his moving awareness of Time’s inexorable pressures, and his emphasis upon the need to face death with dignity.

The collection is divided under the headings chosen by Gogarty himself for Collected Poems

Part 1 - Collected Poems (1951): Odes and Addresses - Earth and Sea - Satires and Facetiae - Love and Beauty -Life and Death - Elegies.

Part 2: Poems in Various Volumes - published and unpublished, not included in Collected Poems. Hyperthuleana (1916), Secret Springs of Dublin Song (1918), The Ship and Other Poems (1918), An Offering of Swans (1923), An Offering of Swans and Other Poems (1924), Wild Apples (1928, 1929, 1930), Selected Poems (1933), Others to Adorn (1938), Elbow Room (1939), Perennial (1944, 1946), Unselected Poems (1954), Penultimate Poems (prepared but unpublished).

Part 3: Poems published in journals and unpublished volumes. Odes and Addresses - Earth and Sea - Satires and Facetiae (Dislikes and Disapprobations, Limericks, Parodies, Light-hearted Verses, Some Martello Tower Poems, Seamus O’Sullivan Poems, Poems concerning Dermot Freyer, Jesting about the Sinclair Brothers, Classical Themes, Religious Thoughts, Political Poems, On Drinking, Medical Meditations, Monto Poems) - Love and Beauty -Life and Death - Elegies.

Appendices, Notes, Notes on the texts, and Addenda, including ‘Delphi’, written as an entry for the Newdigate Prize.

Chosen and Introduced by John Cronin

The fifth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

ISBN: 0-86140-101-8 / 978-0-86140-101-7 Hbk £35.00
ISBN 978-0-86104-102-6 /978-0-86140-102-4 Pbk £9.95

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: Mixed Marriage, Jane Clegg, John Ferguson, Boyd's Shop, Friends and Relations, prose extracts, bibliographical checklist.

John Greer Ervine was born in Ballymacarrett, a working-class district of East Belfast, in 1883 (he added the prefix ‘St.’ to his name when he began to write). He was to achieve a considerable reputation as playwright, drama critic, novelist and biographer, working at various times in London and New York. As a young man, he got to know Bernard Shaw and was associated with the Fabian Society. In 1915 he was appointed manager of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, but his brusque manner and his declared intention of turning the Abbey into a typical British repertory theatre alienated the players, many of whom left to set up a separate company of their own.

Ervine’s real contribution to the Abbey consisted of a number of his vigorous early plays, including Mixed Marriage and John Ferguson. After leaving the Abbey, he joined the British Army and was severely wounded in 1918, necessitating the amputation of a leg. After the War, he wrote drawing-room comedies for the London stage, and his most substantial work of biography was a book on his idol, Shaw. He returned to Irish themes in the 1930s, with plays like Boyd’s Shop, which was to prove one of his most popular and frequently revived works for the stage. A determined realist, Ervine had little sympathy with the work of some his notable contemporaries, and wrote severely about, for example, Synge. Ervine is at his best in those plays in which he depicts characters like John Ferguson, whose rigid moral attitudes are grimly tested by cruel circumstances. He is also impressive in his creation of strong women characters, such as Mrs Rainey in Mixed Marriage and Jane Clegg in the play of that name. In plays like those, he often anticipates his more famous successor, Sean O’Casey, and even looks forward to later Northern Irish writers like Sam Thompson.

This volume was published with assistance from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

John Cronin is Emeritus Professor of English at the Queen’s University, Belfast. His publications include Somerville and Ross, Gerald Griffin 1803-1840: A Critical Biography, and The Anglo-Irish Novel, Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century, and Volume 2, 1900-1940. He is general editor of a series of eight Classic Irish Novels of the Nineteenth Century. In addition to his academic activities, Professor Cronin has worked extensively on arts programmes for BBC Northern Ireland and BBC World Service and was for many years a member of the Anglo-Irish Literature Committee of the Royal Irish Academy.

Edited by Joseph Donohue with Ruth Berggren

21.0 x 27.4 cm   378 pp.  with 158 illus.  1995    Princess Grace Irish Library series (ISSN 0269-2619) volume 10

At its première nearly 125 years ago on Saint Valentine's Day 1895, at the St James's Theatre in King Street, London, Oscar Wilde's `trivial comedy for serious people' The Importance of Being Earnest found great and immediate favour with audiences and critics alike. Yet, by early May, the play had disappeared from the stage, its author convicted of immoral offences and condemned to two years' imprisonment with hard labour. A century later, although Wilde's reputation has long since been restored and his last play for the stage become a timeless classic, much of the meaning and significance the work held for its contemporary audience has been lost or diluted.

The present edition fills this gap in understanding by reconstructing the original 1895 St James's Theatre production. The text itself, derived from theatrical typescripts, including the Lord Chamberlain's licensing copy and Charles Frohman's script for the American premiere, is profusely annotated and illustrated from contemporary sources and presented in a format that balances text and context. An extraordinary range of materials is thus combined to show or explain what the first performance of The Importance of Being Earnest was like in the theatre and how its audiences and critics received it.

Based upon a new, reconstructive method for the study of theatrical performance that aims to set the play securely in its historical and cultural moment, the edition offers a wealth of detail about the staging and acting of the play, including numerous first production and early revival photographs. The reconstructed text itself, remarkably close to the 1899 first edition seen through the press by Wilde himself, recaptures the essential comic vitality of the play that is familiar to audiences throughout the world.

This work will therefore appeal to readers, scholars, theatre practitioners, lovers of the theatre and of the writings of Oscar Wilde.

A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production at St James's Theatre, London, 1895, Annotated and illustrated from contemporary sources, and edited, with introductory essays on the play and its text by Joseph Donohue with Ruth Berggren. This fully annotated edition of the play, with 158 contemporary illustrations, informs the general reader and scholar alike of all those points that are now likely to be missed, while also giving an overall view of the contemporary cultural and political background. It won the 1995 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History.

Chosen and Introduced by Mary Shine Thompson

The fourteenth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: The Son of Learning, The Flame, Black Fast, The Kiss, As the Crow Flies, The Viscount of Blarney, The Second Kiss, Liberty Lane,and the hitherto unpublished The Frenzy of Sweeney and St Patrick’s Purgatory (a translation of Calderón’s play), ‘Verse Speaking’, ‘Verse Speaking and Verse Drama’, and a bibliographical checklist.

Austin Clarke (1896-1974) is known as a poet, a playwright, a broadcaster and a novelist. In the later part of his life his work became better known principally through the support given by Liam Miller and the Dolmen Press in publishing his Collected Plays (1963) and later single plays, and volumes of poems, culminating in his Collected Poems (1974). His work as a reviewer was ceaseless, and during his life he wrote over 1,500 reviews, assessing over 5,000 books, but it must be as one of twentieth century Ireland’s most important poets that he is best known.

Clarke’s plays are less well known, both perhaps because they are verse plays, and also because they have been out of print for so many years, so the publication of a selection was long overdue.

Mary Shine Thompson is a lecturer in the English Department of St Patrick's College Drumcondra (Dublin City University) and College Coordinator of Research. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled 'Austin Clarke; A Literary Life-Chronology'. She was commissioned to prepare the National Library of Ireland's Catalogue of its Austin Clarke holdings, completed in 2003. Among her publications are Studies in Children Literature 1500-2000  (Four Courts Press, 2004) and Treasure Islands, Real And Imagined, in Children's Literature (2005), both edited with C. Keenan.

Please note. Due to changes in sale patterns since the series was started we have not issued this work in paperback. ISBN 0-86140-209-X is cancelled.