The Irish Revival

Around 1900 Irish writers decided that their country needed a theatre of its own and a mythology reread: Yeats and Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, translated the Cuchulain cycles, wrote plays in which an old woman is Ireland herself. Synge went to live in the Aran Islands to hear the speech of fishermen and drew from it a comedy that set off riots in 1907. This literary awakening accompanied the national movement and shortly preceded the rising of 1916 and independence.

works 5

• TaleCuchulain of MuirthemneLady Gregory · 1902The legends of the Ulster hero gathered into a single narrative, in the time of the Irish literary revival.LiteraturePublic domain
• TheatreCathleen ni HoulihanWilliam Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory · 1902Ireland, in the guise of an old woman, comes to ask for blood on the eve of a peasant wedding.Literature
• TheatreThe Playboy of the Western WorldJohn Millington Synge · 1907A supposed parricide becomes the hero of a village in the west of Ireland, at the beginning of the twentieth century.Literature
• EssayThe Candle of VisionGeorge William Russell · 1918A painter, who was also an organiser of rural cooperatives, describes as a mystic what he sees with his eyes open.Literature
• PoetryThe TowerWilliam Butler Yeats · 1928An ageing poet, in his tower in the west of Ireland, in the aftermath of the fratricidal struggles of independence.Literature