LADY GREGORY'S PLAYS
The Image and Other Plays. By Lady Gregory. 12mo. 253 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.
LADY Gregory is the only playwright of to-day who writes comedies that have poetry in them. Her people talk lyrics and ballads. Most of her plays have a weakness—they are not firmly articulated, and too often they give the impression that a subject has been talked out rather than that an action has been brought to an end. Of the plays in the present collection this might be said of three out of the four—The Image, Hanrahan's Oath, The Wrens. The fourth play, Shanwalla, is different; it is compact, and there is something hushed about it.
Shanwalla is a three-act play about a horse and a ghost, and the Connacht woman in Lady Gregory can rise with power in what has to do with these entities. The atmosphere is different from the usual Kiltartan play—it is not of the cross-roads nor the market-place, but of a gentleman's house in Ireland at the Stable-side. In Shanwalla there is nothing loquacious, nothing rhetorically tragical; everything is compact and hushed; the characters are all simple and all well-marked, and there is dramatic tension and power in it. It is one of Lady Gregory's best plays.
The others are typically Kiltartan; they are comedies of language, and they put us into contact with a rich and warm and quaintly cultivated humanity. There is a theme in each of the plays, a theme, rather than a plot, along which the people talk, and what we remember of them is the picturesque talk of the people who have had leisure enough to acquire a vocabulary and a wonderful stock of metaphor, not to speak of a rhythm that constantly rises into hexameters. Lady Gregory has kept note-books of this countryside talk, and her comedies make an anthology of phrases, partly traditional, partly improvised, of the Irish countryside. But no phrase is left sticking out. All are used as if they had never been on a collector's pages. The speeches are delightfully entertaining, but the Irish voice is needed to give the proper flow, intonation, and rhythm. Sometimes one detects speeches that have been made for particular voices:
