The centenary of ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ and Lady Augusta Gregory

The founder of the Abbey Theater and patron of W.B. Yeats

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Sadly, bitter disputes with Dublin Corporation meant that it was almost 50 years before the gallery would eventually open. Lane would never see it as he was on board the British-registered Lusitania when it was sank by the Germans off the cost of Cork in May 1915. Lady Gregory’s son, Robert, was also killed in the First World War and is commemorated in Yeats’s renowned poem An Irishman Foresees his Death.

Lady Gregory’s first visit to the US didn’t just change her public persona: she fell in love with John Quinn, the lawyer who defended the Abbey players in their Philadelphia court case. Lady Gregory is seen as a classic Victorian figure, aloof and repressed. But as Hill’s insightful biography shows, Lady Gregory – described as “Ireland’s greatest living Irishwoman” by George Bernard Shaw – was a passionate and complex character

“Why do I love you so much?,” she wrote to Quinn, 18 years her junior, shortly after her return to Ireland in 1912. “It ought to be from all that piled up goodness of the years. Yet it is not that – it is some call that came in a moment – something impetuous & masterful about you that satisfies me – that gives me perfect rest.”

By the time The Playboy tour limped to Chicago, the last stop on the American tour, in February 1912, it was derided as ‘Cowboy of the Western World’. In the Windy City, Lady Gregory received a death threat in the form of a sheet with a rough drawing of a coffin, hammer, nails and a pistol. On it was scrawled: “your fate is sealed never again shall you gase [sic] on the barren hilltops of Connemara”.

Lady Gregory was unperturbed. She continued to walk to the theater every night and caustically dismissed the threat when she remarked to her friend: “I don’t feel anxious, for I don’t think from the drawing that the sender has much practical knowledge of firearms.” Ouch.

Lady Gregory – An Irish Life by Judith Hill is published by The Collins Press

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