Published to mark Johnston's eightieth birthday, when he was the doyen of Ireland's living playwrights, this volume brings together memories from friends and critical essays on his work and achievement by leading scholars – John Boyd, Curtis Canfield, Richard Allen Cave, Mark Culme-Seymour, Cyril Cusack, Hilton Edwards, Maurice Elliott, Harold Ferrar, Robert Hogan, Thomas Kilroy, Roger McHugh, Micheál mac Liammóir, D.E.S.Maxwell, Vivian Mercier, Christopher Murray, B.L.Reid, Joseph Ronsley and Christine St Peter – together with a checklist of Denis Johnston's writings compiled by the editor of this volume.

Included as an appendix are some recent revisions by Denis Johnston to his A Bride for the Unicorn.

CONTENTS<br

Introduction <br

List of Illustrations <br

AN APPRECIATION. Hilton Edwards<br

THE OLD LADY SAYS `NO!' Micheál MacLiammóir<br

THE OLD LADY: IN PRINCIPIO. Christine St Peter<br

WAITING FOR EMMET. D.E.S.Maxwell<br

A NOTE ON THE NATURE OF EXPRESSIONISM AND DENIS JOHNSTON'S PLAYS. Curtis Canfield<br

THE MOON IN THE YELLOW RIVER: DENIS JOHNSTON'S SHAVIANISM. Thomas Kilroy<br

DENIS JOHNSTON'S HORSE LAUGH. Robert Hogan<br

JOHNSTON, TOLLER AND EXPRESSIONISM. Richard Allen Cave<br

THE GOLDEN CUCKOO: `A VERY REMARKABLE BIRD'. Christopher Murray<br

'HE IS ALWAYS JUST ROUND THE NEXT CORNER.' DENIS JOHNSTON'S IN SEARCH OF SWIFT . Maurice Elliott<br

'A HUMANE AND WELL-INTENTIONED PIECE OF GALLANTRY': DENIS JOHNSTON'S THE SCYTHE AND THE SUNSET Joseph Ronsley<br

THE ENDLESS SEARCH. John Boyd<br

THE PLAYS OF DENIS JOHNSTON. Roger McHugh<br

DEAR DENIS! Cyril Cusack<br

DENIS JOHNSTON'S SPIRITUAL QUEST. Harold Ferrar<br

JOHNSTON IN ACADEME. B.L. Reid<br

WITH DENIS JOHNSTON IN THE WESTERN DESERT. Mark Culme-Seymour<br

PERFECTION OF THE LIFE OR OF THE WORK. Vivian Mercier<br

CHECKLIST-LIST OF DENIS JOHNSTON'S WRITINGS. Joseph Ronsley<br

APPENDIX: REVISIONS TO A BRIDE FOR THE UNICORN, ETC. Denis Johnston<br

Notes on Contributors<br

Index

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It is now over fifty years since the death of Augusta Gregory, who as a playwright, folklorist, essayist, poet, translator, editor, theatre administrator and nationalist, contributed so much and so uniquely to the realisation of modern Ireland. Yet soon after her death she seemed to be virtually forgotten, and the words on her gravestone – ‘she shall be remembered for ever’ – had a very hollow ring about them.

It has only been in the last twenty-five years that Lady Gregory’s reputation has turned round, beginning with Elizabeth Coxhead’s biography, and the subsequent appearance of the Coole Edition of her works. The publication of Mary Lou Kohfeldt's biography in 1985 and now the appearance of this volume – the first collection of essays to be devoted to her – must surely create a greater awareness of her importance as a cornerstone of the Irish Literary Revival.

Her books and plays, together with her work for the Abbey as manager, playwright, play-reader and fund-raiser, have had an influence on the literary life of Ireland in the first half of this century that has been greatly underestimated.

This collection opens with fragments of memory about Lady Gregory, and then brings together leading critics to write about various aspects of her life, her work, and her friendships with Yeats, W. S. Blunt, Sean O’Casey, John Quinn, and Douglas Hyde. There is also a checklist of her contributions to periodicals (over 180 items so far discovered), and an assessment of the work of her son, Robert Gregory.

Fragments of memory come from George Moore, The Sunday Herald (Boston), Signe Toksvig, Sean O’Casey, The Rt. Rev. Arnold Harvey, Anne Gregory, W. B. Yeats, Anne Yeats, Maire nic Shiubhlaigh, W. G. Fay, Brinsley MacNamara and Gabriel Fallon.

The contributors are Andrew E. Malone, Mary FitzGerald, Mary Lou Kohfeldt Stevenson, Brian Jenkins, James Pethica, Elizabeth Longford, Daniel J. Murphy, Gareth W. Dunleavy, Maureen Murphy, John Kelly, Richard Allen Cave, Ronald Ayling, Robert Welch, Bernard Shaw, Dan H. Laurence, Lorna D. Young, Ann Saddlemyer, Colin Smythe.

INTRODUCTION. Ann Saddlemyer and Colin Smythe
Acknowledgements
CHRONOLOGY. Colin Smythe
FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY
Pen Portraits: George Moore Sunday Herald (Boston) Signe Toksvig Sean O'Casey
The Chatelaine of Coole: The Rt. Rev. Arnold Harvey, Anne Gregory, W. B. Yeats, Anne Yeats, Sean O'Casey, W. B. Yeats
At the Abbey Theatre: Maire nic Shiubhlaigh W. G. Fay Brinsley MacNamara Gabriel Fallon
LADY GREGORY, 1852–1932. Andrew E. Malone
'PERFECTION OF THE LIFE': LADY GREGORY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS. Mary FitzGerald
THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES. Mary Lou Kohfeldt Stevenson
THE MARRIAGE. Brian Jenkins
LADY GREGORY AND WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT. Elizabeth Longford
'A WOMAN'S SONNETS'. Lady Gregory, with a Commentary by James Pethica
'DEAR JOHN QUINN''. Daniel J. Murphy
THE PATTERN OF THREE THREADS: THE HYDE-GREGORY FRIENDSHIP. Gareth W. Dunleavy
LADY GREGORY AND THE GAELIC LEAGUE. Maureen Murphy
LADY GREGORY AND SEAN O'CASEY: AN UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP REVISITED. Ronald Ayling
'FRIENDSHIP IS ALL THE HOUSE I HAVE': LADY GREGORY AND W. B. YEATS. John Kelly
A LANGUAGE FOR HEALING. Robert Welch
NOTE ON LADY GREGORY'S PLAYS. Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence
FOUR FRENCH COMEDIES: LADY GREGORY'S TRANSLATIONS OF MOLIÈRE. Mary FitzGerald
IN RETROSPECT: LADY GREGORY'S PLAYS FIFTY YEARS LATER. Lorna D. Young
THE GLORY OF THE WORLD AND THE PEASANT MIRROR. Ann Saddlemyer
LADY GREGORY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS: A CHECKLIST. Colin Smythe
APPENDIX: ROBERT GREGORY: ARTIST AND STAGE DESIGNER. Richard Allen Cave
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Index

22.8 x 15.3 cm. 248 pp. 1880-1920 British Authors Series no. 22

Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism, and Myth takes issue with many assumptions current in Wilde scholarship. It sets an engaging course in exploring Wilde’s literary reputation. In particular, Professors Guy and Small are interested in the tension between Wilde’s enduring popularity with the general reading public as a perennially witty entertainer and his status among academics as a complex, politicised writer attuned to the cultural and philosophical currents associated with modernity. Their argument focuses initially on the prominence of biographical readings of Wilde’s literary works, drawing attention to the contradictions in the ways biographers have described his life and to the problems of seeing his writing as a form of self-disclosure.

Subsequent chapters assess the usefulness of other forms of academic scholarship to understanding works that are not, on the surface, “difficult.” Here a number of commonly held views are challenged. To what extent is De Profundis autobiographical? How sophisticated is the learning exhibited in Intentions? In what ways are the society comedies “about” homosexuality? And how does The Picture of Dorian Gray relate to Wilde’s “mature” style?

The volume also examines some of Wilde’s lesser-known, unfinished works and scenarios, including The Cardinal of Avignon, La Sainte Courtisane, and A Florentine Tragedy (all printed as appendices), arguing that these “failed” works provide important insight into the reasons for Wilde’s popular success.

Since Guy and Small have authored numerous articles and books on Wilde, Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism, and Myth will be a must read for scholars, but it is also written in a jargon-free language that will speak to that wider audience of readers who enjoy Oscar Wilde.

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ISBN 978-0-86140-289-2

All the papers in Medieval and Modern Ireland were presented at the eighteenth annual international conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, held at Calgary, Alberta, in February 1985. The conference theme, Medieval and Modern Ireland, was chosen by the organising committee for its intrinsic merits, and as a reasonable extension of the theme of the previous conference which focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Readers of this volume will be struck by the pervasiveness of the connections between the medieval and the modern in Ireland and the Irish, artists in particular, and realise why James Joyce could hardly avoid linking the modern Irish artist with the medieval Irish monk, as he does in the bitter musings of Stephen Dedalus, who walks alone into eternity along Sandymount Strand: ‘You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery Columbanus.’

The contributors are Hallvard Dahlie, Ann Dooley, John Wilson Foster, Brian John, Toni O’Brien Johnson, Heinz Kosok, F. X. Martin O.S.A., and Wolfgang Zach.

Edited and with an introduction by Stanley Weintraub

A more incongruous friendship than the one reflected in this correspondence is hard to imagine. Shaw is now remembered as the loading playwright of his time, and one of era's most memorable wits; Harris has become notorious for his near-pornographic My Life and Loves, and for a humourless (and disintegrating) sense of self-importance. At one time, Harris had been one of the later nineteenth century's most visible literary figures, a friend of such dissimilar people as Lord Randolph Churchill and Oscar Wilde, an editor of the London Evening News at 29, then editor of the Fortnightly Review and the Saturday Review, whose theatre critic Shaw became. Never quite respectable, Harris had been tolerated — even courted — as an amiable vulgarian when he was a rising star. However, his booming voice and four-letter language, his inability to look like anything other than an Albanian highwayman even when dressed in tails, his gluttonous gormandising and insatiable womanising, quickly made him a pariah in Edwardian circles as his career began to slip and he began to snatch at shady quick-money opportunities.

While Harris's career was hitting bottom, and doing it often, Shaw's reputation as playwright and publicist was growing. However strained Shaw's loyalties to his former editor became, they persisted, and both the strains and loyalties emerge in a generation of their correspondence. The 121 letters in this volume, spanning more than 35 years, reveal much of the private men and become in effect a pair of parallel autobiographies. Letters previously published — such as Shaw's famous remembrance to Harris of Oscar Wilde and his hilarious spoof-Harrisian biography of himself—are now published for the first time in accurate and complete texts, as is Shaw's memorable letter about his sex-life, which he insisted Harris expurgate when, in Harris's last, money-short years, he seized at a publisher's advance to write his former employee's biography. In the end Shaw completed it, in his own fashion, for Harris's widow.

Through these pages emerge the literary and political life of Edwardian and Georgian England, and wartime America, via Shaw's wit and ebullience and Harris's pomposity and paranoia. And in the relationship of the correspondents is a drama of two personalities whom Harris saw as having shared a heyday before one fell upon bad luck. To Harris it was a melodrama, to Shaw a tragicomedy.

Stanley Weintraub,was Research Professor and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Apart from numerous other books, he is author or editor of more than a dozen books on Shaw, including Private Shaw and Public Shaw, Journey to Heartbreak, and The Portable Bernard Shaw. He is also editor of SHAW, The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, successor to The Shaw Review.

Horace Plunkett is remembered for his efforts to transform Irish agricultural practice, through the Co-operative Movement which he founded in 1889, and its administration via the Department of Agriculture, which he established ten years later.

From a protestant ascendancy background, Plunkett was one of those ‘fenian unionists' who were always able to see both sides of the Irish Question, and whose reforming zeal, and frank expression of opinion, during the period in which Ireland moved from benevolent Tory rule by Westminster, to independence for the south and partition of the island, brought him into conflict with all shades of political opinion.

This biography traces the development and interplay of his social and political philosophies, establishing Plunkett as the pioneer of modernisation of Ireland's principal industry, and as a political figure whose ideals and experience are of abiding interest.

In this highly acclaimed biography, Lesley Whiteside traces the events and influences which shaped George Otto Simms's life, from his boyhood in Co. Donegal, through his education and early ministry in Ireland to his years as Bishop of Cork, Archbishop of Dublin, and finally Archbishop of Armagh. The author explores the academic and ecclesiastical aspects of his life, while much of the book is concerned with the sometimes difficult years in Dublin and Armagh, with ecumenical progress and the tragedy of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

`This is a well deserved biography and it has proved worthy of its subject'

Church Times

Edited by Alan Price

paperback 21.4 cm.

J.M.Synge died in 1909 and The Works of John M. Synge were published in four volumes by Maunsel & Co., Dublin, in 1910. Since that time, with the exception of a few minor verses and one or two fragments of prose, the canon of his work has remained unaltered. Nevertheless, much unpublished material exists, for the most part of great interest and significance for the understanding of Synge's methods of work and development. This material, including early drafts of the plays, notebooks, poems, and fragments of poetic drama, has now been thoroughly explored in order to create this definitive edition, first published by Oxford University Press 1962-68, which not only collects together all that is of significance in his printed and in his unprinted work, but also, by a careful use of worksheets and early drafts, indicates much of the process of creation which occurred before the production of the printed page. The Collected Works is in four volumes, under the general editorship of the late Professor Robin Skelton, of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who began the series with his edition of the poems and translations.

The second volume, edited by the late Dr Alan Price, of The Queen's University, Belfast, author of Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama, assembles all Synge's prose writings of any merit or interest. Over half of it consists of a reprint of The Aran Islands, and In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara, checked and supplemented where necessary by collation with Synge's own manuscripts and proofs. About a quarter consists of articles and reviews not previously collected, and the rest, including most of Part One, was never published before. Thus the prose of Synge can here be seen as a whole and should lead to a deeper understanding of both the writer and the Anglo-Irish literary revival. Thirty-five drawings by Jack B. Yeats are included.

These volumes were published in 1982 by arrangement with Oxford University Press.

The First Edition of 1876, with an Introduction and Commentary by Brian Arkins

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, people from Britain and Ireland began to visit Greece, mainly with a view to investigating the material remains of the ancient Greek past. Long before he gained eminence as Provost of Trinity College Dublin, and as a Classicist, John Pentland Mahaffy had been hired to accompany a Cambridge undergraduate, William Goulding, around Greece and his account of those travels was published as Rambles and Studies in Greece in 1876.

In it Mahaffy describes a world wildly different from that which greets the modern visitor – at least in the methods of transport and ease (or lack of it) of getting from one place to another and the questions of where to stay. It was almost as alien to visitors from the British Isles then as it would be for visitors of this century visiting the Ireland of the nineteenth.

Ancient Greece was the same as now: the beauty of the landscape endures, but then rivalries between local museums ensured that there were inadequate records of the country’s antiquities, and no central record of what had actually been discovered, so travellers were often embarking on a journey of discovery, finding unrecorded inscriptions, and more importantly entire buildings, while occasional meetings with local brigands in certain parts of the country added a sense of danger and adventure.

Mahaffy’s work was therefore an eye-opener for the armchair traveller, and in Britain it went through five editions by 1907, each enlarged and revised, as well as being published in the USA in 1892, and in 1913 Macmillan New York published what they described as the seventh edition. The first American edition, published by Henry Coates in 1900, contained a number of contemporary photographs that had not appeared in earlier editions, and a number of these are reproduced here, with engravings that appeared in the first edition.

As the editor of the present edition, Professor Brian Arkins, notes: ‘This new edition of Mahaffy’s Rambles and Studies in Greece reprints the text of the first edition of 1876, in which the author states that ‘It is to me a cherished object to make English-speaking people intimate with the life of the old Greeks’. Mahaffy achieves that object with great éclat, so that his book functioned at the time – and still functions – as an excellent introduction to the history, archaeology, landscape, literature, visual art and music of ancient Greece. So although Mahaffy’s book went into seven editions … the first edition of 1876 has a freshness and vividness that the material added in later editions serves only to obscure; for that reason, the first edition is here reprinted, and provided with a full Commentary.’ It is as interesting now to the modern reader as it was to those reading it over 130 years ago.

Brian Arkins is Professor Emeritus of Classics at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and one of the Directors of the Irish Institute of Hellenic Studies in Athens. He was educated at Clongowes Wood College and at University College Dublin, where he obtained an MA in Classics and a PhD in Latin. He is the author of eleven books of criticism, including three on Latin poetry and four on Greek and Roman themes in modern Irish Literature. His most recent book is What Shakespeare Stole from Rome (2012).

CONTENTS<br

List of Illustrations<br

Mahaffy: Classicist and Philhellene. By Brian Arkins<br

Preface<br

I. Introduction – First Impressions of the Coast<br

II. General Impressions of Athens and Attica<br

III. Athens – The Museums – The Tombs<br

IV. The Acropolis of Athens<br

V. Excursions in Attica – Phalerum – Laurium<br

VI. Excursions in Attica – Sunium – Marathon – Eleusis<br

VII. From Athens to Thebes – The Passes of Mount Cithaeron, Eleutherae, Plataea<br

VIII. The Plain of Orchomenos, Lebadea, Chaeronea<br

IX. Arachova – Delphi – The Bay of Cirrha<br

X. Corinth, Mycenae, Tiryns<br

XI. Argos, Nauplia, and Coast of Argolis<br

XII. Greek Music and Painting<br

Commentary. By Brian Arkins<br

Index

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x, 252pp. 21.6cm

For decades, commentators on nineteenth-century Irish literature or history have routinely mentioned the significance of the Dublin University Magazine. Published monthly from January 1833 to December 1877, the DUM attracted as its contributors – and in several cases its editors – nearly every major Irish writer from this period. Prior to the publication of this work, however, there has been no systematic, book-length discussion of the magazine’s entire career.

In this study, Wayne Hall traces the dual nature of the magazine, its attention to both England and Ireland, which helps us to understand the sometimes guilty and reluctant, sometimes celebratory and passionate, union of these different cultural traditions and values. The DUM expressed a complex brand of Irish national identity that defines itself partly in cultural and partly in political terms.

In seeking its own balance between excluding and including, between culture and politics, the DUM developed one main pattern in its pages: the magazine’s political commentary stakes out the ideological ground with varying degrees of rigidity and exclusivity, while its literary contributions expand the magazine’s total scope to embrace a much wider and more generous vision of ‘Irishness’.

Within the terms and tensions of the journalistic dialogue, then, readers can see the political and the literary values jostling against each other. The magazine serves as a detailed and thorough record of conservative political thought in the nineteenth century, and also shows that Irish political events have drawn much of their shape from the literature, even as that literature was being shaped in turn by politics.

Wayne E. Hall is an associate dean at the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Cincinnati, as well as a faculty member of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. His previous book was Shadowy Heroes: Irish Literature in the 1890s.

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Selected Prose & Related Documents

336 pp. 23.4 x 13.5 cm illus. in colour and monochrome

Poet of the Second World War and peacetime dramatist, Francis Warner was 75 this year (2012). This, the first selection from his prose, gives readers of his work some indication of the historical and intellectual background from which his poetry has sprung: of 'the giant race before the flood' who lived on to help shape Britain's post-war imagination.

Starting with memories of the Blitz and his poem 'Blitz Requiem', Warner recalls his schooldays at Christ's Hospital, Horsham, recovering from six years of war, and the role played by music.

He writes of his friends: 'Henry Chadwick: Musician', Kathleen Raine as fellow poet, C. S. Lewis and the Psalms, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Edmond Blunden, and Samuel Beckett, reproducing the manuscripts off two short plays Beckett discussed with and gave to him. Other subjects include W. B. Yeats, Benjamin Britten and the Japanese Noh plays, Samuel Palmer as poet, and Hugh Wybrew's Liturgical Texts of the Orthodox Church.

The book concludes with 'Francis Warner as Musician in Performance' an illustrative CD with music by Honegger, Vaughan Williams, and Warner's collaborator the composer and organist David Goode: and Stephen Cleobury conducting the Choir of King's College Cambridge singing one of their anthems.

Francis Warner DLitt, Hon. DMus, is Emeritus Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford, and Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

Contents

Armageddon and Faith: a Survivor's Meditation on the Blitz, 1940-45
Blitz Requiem
Remembrance Sunday Sermon, King's College Chapel, Cambridge, 2011
Four War Sonnets
Christ's Hospital Three and Sixty Years Ago
Henry Chadwick: Musician
The Song that is Christmas
A Cambridge Friendship: Kathleen Raine and Francis Warner
C. S. Lewis and the Revision of the Psalter
A Blessing on C. S. Lewis's home in Oxford, The Kilns
Foreword to Hugh Wybrew: Liturgical Texts of the Orthodox Church
The Bones and the Flesh: Henry Moore and Francis Bacon
Samuel Palmer's Poem 'The Sorceress'
James Joyce's Poetry
J. M. Synge's Poetry
Edmund Blunden's Pastoral Poetry
Richard Wall's rondeau cycle In Aliquot Parts
Japanese Noh plays and W. B. Yeats, Benjamin Britten and Samuel Beckett
Manuscript of Beckett's Breath
The Absence of Nationalism in the Work of Samuel Beckett
Manuscript of Beckett's Sans, and covering Letter
A Cup of Coffee in Paris, by Penelope Warner
Francis Warner as a Musician in the1950s, by Bernard Martin
Compact disc: Francis Warner as Musician in Performance
Anthem for Christ the King
Notes
Index