Abstract
Some years ago one of these demons who write books on special subjects wrote to me: she was making a study of the theme of ‘The Children of Lir’, and in her ransacking of all languages and literatures she discovered that half a century ago I had published in the Weekly [Irish ] Independent (Dublin) a short play entitled The Children of Lir , and she wanted me to send her the text. I thanked whatever saint there is who bestows oblivion on the juvenilia of poets and dramatists and wrote back that my forgetfulness of the matter was almost complete. But she, being a determined researcher, did not leave it at that: she then sent me a picture showing the special hell that those who baulked researchers were cast into, implying that my escape from it depended on my recalling something about that publication. And this started the train of recollection whose stages form this lecture.
Dublin Magazine , 24 (Oct 1949) 11–17; 25 (Jan 1950), 18–25.
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Notes
See Zack Bowen, Padraic Colum (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970);
Alan Denson, ‘Padraic Colum: An Appreciation with a Checklist of His Publications’, Dublin Magazine , 6 (Spring 1967) 50–67;
Padraic Colum, The Road Round Ireland (New York: Macmillan, 1926).
James A. Joyce, ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, Fortnightly Review (London), n.s. 67 (1 Apr 1900) 575–90.
Letter to Ibsen dated March 1901, reprt in Letters of James Joyce , ed. Stuart Gilbert (London: Faber & Faber, 1957) pp. 51–2.
At a general meeting of the Irish National Theatre Society on 15 Feb 1903, W. G. Fay refused to produce The Saxon Shillin’ , a propagandist play against enlistment of Irishmen in the British army, ostensibly on the grounds of a weak ending. Colum, however, later declared that Fay did not wish to incur the hostility of the ‘garrison’. The Saxon Shillin ’ was published in Lost Plays of the Irish Renaissance , ed. Robert Hogan and James Kilroy (Newark, Delaware: Proscenium Press, 1970).
See John B. Yeats, ‘Ireland Out of the Dock’, United Irishman (Dublin), 10 October 1903, p. 2;
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© 1988 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Colum, P. (1988). Early Days of the Irish Theatre. In: Mikhail, E.H. (eds) The Abbey Theatre. Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08508-8_14
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