I have gathered into this book two plays, written before the foundation of the Irish Theatre though much corrected since, and four plays written but the other day and intended for performance in drawing-room and studio, and a long series of dramatic notes.1 I begin the book with these notes, which are taken for the most part from an occasional publication called Samhain, started in the third year of ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’ to defend that movement, and long out of print. In a little while Dáil Éireann and our Dublin newspapers will consider, as I hope, the foundation of an Irish State Theatre; and I would put these old notes into evidence.2 Though often about foolish quarrels, or plays but little better, they may keep their use even when that occasion passes; being passionately written, and at a moment when Ireland was preparing, in that dark portion of the mind which is like the other side of the moon, for insurrection and anarchic violence; and all in some measure a plea for intellectual spontaneity against unyielding, mechanical, abstract principles. I ask indulgence if I overrate their value, for it may be that I cannot judge sentences that call up memories of the time when I was most alive, having most friends and enemies. All needful explanations are in Lady Gregory’s book, Our Irish Theatre.3
The plays are so abundantly annotated and prefaced that I need say nothing more except that the first was planned and partly written when I was little more than a boy, and that it gives me more pleasure in the memory than any of my plays. It was all thought out in the first fervour of my generation’s distaste for Victorian rhetoric; that rhetoric once away, every poetical virtue seemed possible.
Dublin
February 1923