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PREFACE

In this book are all Plays of mine played at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, except "The Land of Heart's Desire" and "The Countess Cathleen," which are in Poems (T. Fisher Unwin). I have also written Four Plays for Dancers, but I leave them under separate cover as they were written for private performances in studio or drawing-room, and are a different form of art. "On Baile's Strand," though produced for the first time at the opening of the Abbey Theatre in December 1904, was planned when I had no hope of that, or any, theatre, and the characters walk on to an empty stage at the beginning and leave that stage empty at the end, because I thought of its performance upon a large platform with a door at the back and an exit through the audience at the side, and no proscenium, or curtain; and being intended for a platform

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