Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey TheatreAuthor(s): Paige ReynoldsSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 63-84Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20646450 .

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Paige Reynolds

Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre

In their introduction to The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (1946), William Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn R Ulrich provide a sem inal definition of the little magazine as an organ strictly anticommercial because of its commitment to publishing cerebral and unorthodox work. That charac terization has until recently been uncritically embraced by scholars of this

genre. By focusing largely on American little magazines like Poetry The Mass es, and The Little Review, Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich further explain that these "advance guard" magazines were described as "little" because "the word desig nated above everything else ... a limited group of intelligent readers"1 In his recent study The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and

Reception 1905-1920 (2000), Mark Morrisson usefully and convincingly argues that in fact these journals in both England and America adapted the techniques of the mass-market press in a quest to popularize modernist ideals and aes

thetics. Though never achieving the vast recognition accorded magazines like

England's Tit Bits, these little magazines suggest for Morrisson "an early opti mism about the power of mass market technologies and institutions to trans

form and rejuvenate contemporary culture," owing in part to their efforts to

assert widely the public function of art.2 These radically different perceptions of

the intended audience for the little magazine?insights separated by half a

century?reflect the transformation in how literary criticism depicts mod

ernism's relationship to mass culture. Hoffman and his fellow editors advocate

in their definition the narrowly anticommercial elitism of a New Critical mod

ernism, whereas Morrisson insists these publications bridged the "great divide"

separating high art and popular art.3

1. Fredrick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, Carolyn E Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bib

liography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946) p. 3.

2. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception

1905-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), p. 6.

3. The term "great divide" is taken from Andreas Huyssen's influential study After the Great

Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986),

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW/IRIS &IREANNACH NUA> TA ( WINTER/GEIMHREADH, 2003), 63-84



The Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre

Though their observations and conclusions regarding this genre are fre

quently at odds, these two studies share one thing: their critical analyses focus

exclusively on twentieth-century modernist practice in England and America.

However, as early as the 1890s, Ireland produced a variety of publications that

could be accurately designated "little magazines."4 An array of Irish journals

provided literature and social commentary for "intelligent readers" during this

period, including Shan Van Vocht (1896-1899), a nationalist literary magazine edited by Ethna Carbery and Alice Milligan; Frederick Ryan and John Eglinton s

short-lived Dana (1904-1905); and The Shanachie (1906-1907), a Dublin literary

quarterly published by Maunsel and Co. These journals were soon followed by a host of others, including The Irish Review (1911-1914), Dublin Magazine

(1923-1958), and perhaps most famously Sean O'Faolain's The Bell (1940-1954).

During the early years of the Irish Literary Revival, a remarkable number of

nationalist organizations promoted their tenets through cultural journals that

also regularly made available the experimental work and intellectual prose of

native authors. For example, The Gael, the journal of the Gaelic Athletic Asso

ciation, offered its readers Yeats's writings; The Irish Monthly, a religious peri odical celebrating Catholicism, published Moore's The Unfilled Field along with

the work of Wilde, Yeats, and Tynan; and The Irish Homestead, the weekly jour nal of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, introduced stories from

Joyces Dubliners. This distinctive relationship among the popular institution,

publicity, and publication seems of particular importance in understanding the little magazine in Ireland. From the inception of the Revival, there appears a recognition of the crucial dynamic between scattered, isolated readers and the

individuals who gathered in shared time and space, whether, as in the case of the

journals mentioned above, to play and cheer Gaelic sport, to worship in church, or to work together to create agricultural cooperatives.

In particular, one publication produced during the Irish Literary Revival and associated expressly with a cultural institution?the Abbey Theatre?allows us to explore murky terrain untrod by Hofrman and his coauthors and glimpsed at by Morrisson; that is, the site where modernist editors and authors awkwardly strove to cultivate audiences simultaneously elitist and popular, abstracted and

which supported a view of modernism as characterized by an anxious and aggressive effort to main tain a stark division between high art and mass culture.

4. While The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography admits a set of pre-i9iowadvance guard magazines" that were devoted to experimentalism in one form or another and briefly abstracts the

Abbeys occasional publications in the concluding bibliography, it claims that as far as the little mag azine goes the "first decade of the twentieth century seemed as barren as any decade of the nine teenth

" The Little Magazine, p. 7.

64




actual.5 The occasional publications of the Irish Literary Theatre, the Irish National Dramatic Company, the Irish National Theatre Society, and the Irish National Theatre Society, Ltd.?all the various incarnations of the early Abbey Theatre?were burdened with the dual and often contradictory tasks of engag ing the intellectual reading public while simultaneously widely promoting their

organization so as to assemble a popular national audience.6 Like the little

magazines typically associated with early twentieth-century modernist practice, these occasional publications offered eclectic literary and scholarly content,

presented an editorial stance challenging dominant culture, and introduced

previously unpublished work.

Between 1899 and 1909, the Abbey published three series of occasional pub lications?Beltaine, Samhain, and The Arrow?each edited by Yeats and offer

ing their readership assorted content devoted to Irish drama and culture by authors including George Russell, Alice Milligan, George Moore, Lady Grego ry, Douglas Hyde, and Yeats himself. In any issue, readers might find the texts of select native plays, performance reviews, critical essays on Continental drama, Irish language and English translations of poetry and myth, and notes about the

Abbey and its quest to create an Irish national theater. Given the formal resem

blance of the little magazine and the occasional publication, it might be

assumed that the publications were similarly directed toward an elite readership eager for progressive content. And in fact, the Abbey's "little magazines'5 were

5. Morrisson describes how Harold Monro's journals Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama pro

moted the "pure voice" as a marker of distinction among the middle- and upper-class English. By

persuasively demonstrating how modernist poets were influenced by the verse recitation movement

of late Victorian and Edwardian England, he traces the rich relationship between reading audiences

and listening audiences, one similar to the dynamic I describe for reading audiences and theater

audiences. He also suggests that the modernist investment in public poetry readings at spaces like

Monro's Poetry Bookshop was in part an effort to attract new audiences for experimental poetry, even as he acknowledges the failure of this quest for broad popularity. 6. The Abbey Theatre is the name by which the various incarnations of the Irish Literary Theatre

(1897-1901), The Irish National Dramatic Company (1902), The Irish National Theatre Society

(1903-1906), and The National Theatre Society, Ltd. (1906-) were known. The term "Abbey Theatre"

literally refers only to the name of the theater buildings (the Mechanics* Institute Theatre and

neighboring edifices) purchased by Annie Homiman to house these companies. But the name

Abbey Theatre has been abstracted in historical and critical work so that it refers both to the insti

tution of this theater (the formal elements of the theater such as place and occasion) and to the for

mations that interact with that institution (i.e., the groups or movements affiliated with the insti

tution and their philosophies and goals). In Culture (London: Fontana, 1981), Raymond Williams

claims that the interaction between the institution and the formation provides the signals that mark

theatrical practices as legitimate culture. When referring in general terms to institutional history, I

use his analysis and the tradition of invoking "The Abbey Theatre" to refer to the place, the admin

istration, and the performers affiliated with the theater.

:.xm,.




pitched toward a limited and sympathetic reading public, one that would sup

port the theater's critique of popular drama and of conventional public taste.

But these occasional publications also served as a promotional device for the

early Abbey Theatre, which, as an adjunct of the Irish Literary Revival, sought to

assemble a broad Irish audience for national culture. The Abbey's occasional

publications therefore could not give voice to the modernist disdain for popular

audiences, nor could they unequivocally oppose the influence of nationalist cul

ture. While previous studies have portrayed little magazines as seeking either elite

or popular audiences, the occasional magazines of the Abbey anticipated simul

taneously a small reading public which would support an experimental theater

and a large theater audience which would attend their native plays. The theater

initially imagined that its literary and theatrical work would engender cultural

cohesion among discrete audiences, and this mistaken presumption helps explain its complex relationship to the national citizenry. The Abbey's clumsy negotia tions in its occasional publications between reading publics and theater audi

ences, both elite and mainstream, also bring to light surprising overlaps between

national culture and consumer culture. Both presume an audience of uniform,

receptive subjects; both effectively mobilize the desire to create a broad, loyal con

stituency; and both provide an educative function in which the product, cultur

al or material, ideally serves as the instrument to create a homogenous audience. The Abbey's occasional publications provide another useful example of the pro ductive tension between high modernist culture and popular consumer culture, but more provocatively, they demonstrate how that dynamic relationship must be recalibrated when nationalist concerns are added to the mix.

Before they began either to publish their occasional magazines or to stage their drama in front of actual audiences, the founding members of the Abbey categorically resisted the notion that the reading public and the theater audience

might be different entities. They refused to acknowledge the obvious fact that the institutional structure of theater creates a specific audience whose response to a unique performance is affected by a complex web of social interactions,

whereas a reading public is assembled from individual readers who?in differ ent times and places?directly encounter a material and often mass-produced text. A function of arrogance and idealism, this denial was evidenced first by the somewhat oxymoronic designation given to the Abbey's first manifestation, the Irish Literary Theatre (ILT). In their 1897 manifesto, Gregory, Edward Mar

tyn, Yeats, and their compatriots expressed confidence that they would garner "the support of all Irish people ... in carrying out a work that is outside of all the political questions that divide us."7 The Abbey's initial vision of a national

7. Augusta Gregory, Our Irish Theatre: A Chapter of Autobiography (New York: Putnam's, 1913), pp. 8-9.

66




theater audience as one of "all Irish people" drawn together by a love for native drama strikingly resembles Benedict Anderson's famous theorization of a national imagined community that allows variant individual citizens in their "secular, particular, visible invisibility" to imagine themselves as belonging to a

kinship of fellow reader-citizens.8 Like Anderson's formulation, the ILT mani festo failed to take into account what might follow if variant, embodied citizens were to encounter one another directly in shared time and space, as at a per formance. Further, by announcing that the theater expected the "freedom to

experiment" for a drama representing Ireland as the "home of ancient idealism," this manifesto once more inaccurately conflated divergent audiences, welding one eager for a forward-focused modernist aesthetic to one invested in a tradi tion-laden national exemplar. This statement of purpose, a letter created by a

small group of like-minded intellectuals asking for financial support from sym

pathetic readers, assumed consensus even as it begged conflict.

By studying the early Abbey's three occasional publications, we can trace the

ongoing struggle to reconcile the theater's ideal audience?an apolitical public of readers uniformly sympathetic to their experimental work?with its real audience composed predominantly of diverse and politically active Irish citizens

eager for a theater positively representing the incipient nation. Additionally, the

changing form and content of these magazines reflect the shift in the Abbey's

perception of what role the little magazine, as an organ publishing unorthodox

opinion and unknown or experimental literature, might play in its attempt to

create a national institution.

The first of the Abbey's occasional publications, Beltaine, appeared in 1899 and,

in its three numbers, chronicled the rise of the Irish Literary Theatre. Directed,

like most little magazines, toward metropolitan reading audiences, this publi cation from its inception bore the hallmarks of anti-imperialism?and antina

tionalism. It was printed and disseminated both in Dublin, the colonial locus of

an increasingly potent political and cultural nationalism, and in London, the

imperial capital where Yeats and his ILT cohorts, many of whom had published

successfully with a variety of English journals and presses, hoped to find a

small, ready-made readership.9 The occasional publication's form and content,

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National

ism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 44

9. Likewise, the journal and its contributors may have hoped to capitalize on enthusiasms in Lon

don for noncommercial theaters like J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre and the private Stage Soci

ety, and for Irish drama, which had come into vogue with the work of Shaw and Wilde, if not with

the 1894 London production of Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire.

67




like its intended cosmopolitan readership, confirmed that it would mimic what

we have come to recognize as norms of the modernist little magazine. In the first issue oiBeltaine, published in conjunction with the ILT inaugural

performances in May, 1899,, readers were presented a list of the theater's guar antors and the programs for the premieres of Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and

Martyn's The Heather Field. But just as any little magazine might, this publica tion also provided readers with a mix of oppositional opinion and introduced

new literature. Readers could avail themselves, for instance, of an essay reprint ed from the Daily Express about Scandinavian dramatists by C. H. Herford. This

topic, along with Lionel Johnson's critique of The Countess Cathleen and a

reprint of Moore's introduction to The Heather Field, welcomed and encour

aged the influence of Continental drama on native plays, anathema to many nationalists and revivalist intellectuals. Additionally, Yeats first published here

Johnson's poem "Prologue" and his own new lyrics from The Countess Cathleen.

These lyrics would be only one of the autocratic editor's contributions: Yeats

also provided voluminous editorial notes and an extended critical essay titled

"The Theatre."

Yeats's opinion essays in this first issue of Beltaine conveyed the emblematic

oppositional stance of the little magazine when they aggressively pitted the ILT

productions against those of the commercial theater, and assumed the reader

audience would support this initiative. The Abbey's writers would, according to

Yeats, "appeal to that limited public which gives understanding, and not to that unlimited public which gives wealth; and if they interest those among their audi ence who keep in their memories the songs of Callanan and Walsh, or old Irish

legends, or who love the good books of any country, they will not mind greatly if others are bored."10 The national audience here is not composed of individu als who claim to be Irish based on racial or political affiliations. Instead, to be part of the Abbey's national audience, an individual must hold Irish song and legend or in truth the "good books of any country" in mind; the national theater audi ence is analogous to the limited reading public. Likewise, Yeats asserted,

I remember, some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little recog nised, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to put it on the stage in some small suburban theatre, where a small audience would pay its expenses. I said

that he should follow it the year after, at the same time of the year, with anoth er play, and so on from year to year; and that the people who read books, and do not go to the theatre, would gradually find out about him.11

10. W. B. Yeats, "Plans and Methods;' Beltaine: The Organ of the Irish Literary Theatre, 1 (May, i899)>7 11. W.B. Yeats, "The Theatre," Beltaine, 1 (May, 1899), 20.

68




By cultivating an elite audience, Yeats appeared to ignore the bulk of Irish citizens, the real national audiences who swarmed the commercial theaters, worshipped in Catholic churches, and eagerly read the nationalist press. In this same issue of Beltaine, he again disregarded his largest constituency when he

pointedly overlooked the burgeoning Dublin middle classes and imagined the national audience as a small body composed of educated readers who were "ourselves and our friends" and "a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought"12 Howev er, Yeats's insistence on regularly producing esoteric verse plays for sympathet ic audiences reveals another promotional strategy of the theater intended to cul tivate broad public interest. He imagined that the consistent reiteration of good art might create an enduring audience, a logic evident in the designation of Beltaine (Irish for May) and its successor Samhain (Irish for November) after ancient seasonal festivals, or as Yeats wrote, "the old names for Hallow-Eve and

May Day."13 In time, the ILT might persuade even the most reluctant citizen to

support this new institution and its aesthetics through the inevitable recurrence of experimental drama and avant-garde commentary.

From their inception, these occasional publications evinced the editorial self

importance characteristic of little magazines and sought through their content to

manipulate the interpretive strategies of their audience. Ideally, the early Abbey supposed the audience would read these essays, which unraveled the plots of

these complicated new plays and introduced the ideological aims of the theater, and would be persuaded to embrace unconditionally the theater's aesthetics and

institutional intentions. Informed by these written texts, the audience of readers

could now watch the live, unique theatrical productions in shared appreciation of

their previously unfamiliar form and content. Yet, when the theater began to

perform its plays before what the Dublin diarist Joseph Holloway described as "a

large and most fashionable audience,"14 the ILT failed to receive the "tolerant

welcome" they had requested in their founding manifesto; students hissed The

Countess Cathleen, possessed of a reasonable antipathy for English actors per

forming Irish drama and influenced by Hugh O'DonnelTs anti-Abbey pamphlet Souls for Gold and editorials protesting the play.15 As a necessarily social occasion,

12. W. B. Yeats, "The Theatre"Beltaine, i (May, 1899), 20.

13. W. B. Yeats to Thomas Hutchison, November, 1902, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 3:

1901-1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 250.

14. Joseph Holloway (Monday, 8 May 1899), Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre: A Selection from His

Unpublished Journal Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, ed. Robert Hogan and Michael J. O'Neill (Car

bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 4.

15. The Daily Nation (6 May 1899), for instance, protested the play "in the names of morality and

religion and Irish nationality." Cited in Hugh Hunt, The Abbey: Ireland's National Theatre 2904-1979

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p, 28.

69




theatrical performances allow members of the audience to influence each other,

to publicly and immediately demonstrate their variant responses. Thus, the

embodied community of an inevitably diverse theater audience threatened the

receptive integrity that the ILT accorded its abstract reading communities and

subcommunities. More worrying to the ILT, the readers and playgoers who

attended The Countess Cathleen were clearly absorbing and responding to mate

rial, both theatrical and textual, at odds with the theater's announced aesthetic

and political objectives.

Having directly encountered the challenges offered by competing publics and their influence on theatrical reception, the ILT began to present in its occa

sional publications their renovated understanding of the Irish audience. The

next issue of Beltaine, published in 1900 after these first productions, called a

more expansive Irish national audience into being by resolutely asserting that

the Irish theater audience was different than and superior to the English theater

audience. In this second number, Moore, Martyn, Gregory, and Yeats each

aggressively insisted that the Irish audience loved poetry, history, and oral cul

ture and reviled the corrupted amusement celebrated by English audiences. In

his essay "Is the Theatre a Place of Amusement?" Moore claimed that theater

audiences register and maintain the well-being of a nation. Accordingly, the

greatest threat to Ireland lurks in the misguided Dublin playgoer who falls vic

tim to the faults of English audiences and pursues the inferior experience of

"distraction" and "amusement" at the theater.16 Like Moore, Martyn assessed the

"great intellectual awakening in Ireland" and positioned "English audiences, whose taste is for nothing but empty parade" against a Dublin audience's "ide alism founded upon the ancient genius of the land "17 The Abbey's ideal audi ence was no longer a small one composed only of nobles and peasants; now, it welcomed anyone who reviled English popular theater. In part, these essays worked to condition ILT audiences not to anticipate the norms of popular the

ater; they were warned not to expect the hero and villain of melodrama, to resist the vociferous responses allowed in commercial theaters, and to accept the

complex and ambiguous resolutions the ILT writers might stage. Yet, by cham

pioning the superiority of the Irish audience over its English equivalent, the ILT

tapped into the same nationalist impulses that had driven readers of Souls for Gold and the nationalist dailies to protest The Countess Cathleen when their

reception context transformed them into audience members. In the coda of the second issue of Beltaine, Lady Gregory summed up the

ILT's activities of the previous year, asserting that both "An Irish audience" and

16. George Moore, "Is the Theatre a Place of Amusement?" Beltaine, 2 (February, 1900), 8. 17. Edward Martyn, "A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences

" Beltaine, 2

(February, 1900), 12.

70




"Readers of Irish newspapers" were well informed of the reception and success of the productions of The Heather Field and The Countess Cathleen}* Her

assumptions suggest a particular intimacy among the theater's constituency, which she imagines in equal measure as spectators and readers. She then pro vides a pastiche of critical excerpts from English journals, including the Speak er, the Outlook, and To-day, each of which celebrated the enthusiastic reception of these plays by Irish audiences. For example, the review extracted from To-day reads in part,

'The first act [of The Heather Field] I feared would bore, but people were atten tive, and, after that, when the second act began, there was no further question.

Martyn's popularity was unbounded; the crowd was never tired of shouting for

him.'19

The technique of offering material from other newspapers and intellectual

journals was employed in subsequent numbers of each occasional publication. Because these excerpts ranged from the glowingly positive to the darkly nega tive, they appeared to stage a lively and democratic debate among divergent published opinions, providing the illusion of a public sphere of editorial opin ion that the discriminating reader might intelligently examine. These citations from English periodicals presumed a disinterested reader removed from the

partisan passions of Irish nationalism. Gregory's canny editing of foreign press

appraisal simply advanced the company's most optimistic fantasy: that the Irish

audience?one that many feared irremediably contaminated by the English

popular theater?had naturally and of its own accord welcomed the arrival of

these artists' esoteric drama.

Even in the seemingly fixed and stable confines of print, however, the insta

bility that inheres in reception for the reading public erupts, as it did for the the

ater audience. In a short essay for this same second issue addressing her own

play The Last Feast of the Fianna, Alice Milligan writes, "The Editor of Beltaine

has assured me that it is necessary to give some definite information as to the

basis of this play." She observes, "If it was to be produced before a company of

Kerry peasants, a single note would not be needed... but an'educated' Dublin

audience will need to be told who these people were."20 Milligan exposes the

variant construals of meaning produced by even the most competent reader and

audience member when she announces that Yeats has "explained my little play as having some spiritual and mystical meaning," and then corrects his inter

pretation by announcing that she intended it solely as a domestic problem play.

18. Lady Augusta Gregory, "Last Year" Beltaine, 2 (February, 1900), 25.

19. Gregory, "LastYear" 28.

20. Alice MiUigan, "The Last Feast of the Fianna," Beltaine, 2 (February, 1900), 18.

71




Yeats literally interrupts her text with an asterisk keyed to his claim that" [t]he

emotion which a work of art awakens in an onlooker has commonly little to do

with the deliberate purpose of its maker, and must vary with every onlooker."21

This debate with Milligan demonstrates Yeats's inability to create consensus

even among the "right people." Yet he also evocatively intimates that an audi

ence, reading or theatrical, composed of the "limited public that gives under

standing" allows for receptive practices that beneficially exceed the under

standing of the artist.

When the third and final number of Beltaine was published in 1901, Yeats

argued that the Irish Literary Theatre had succeeded because it had, according to him, "found, as I think the drama must do in every country, those interests

common to the man of letter and the man in the crowd."22 After two produc tion seasons, the ILT now used the little magazine to address the middle-class

urban audience?the "man in the crowd"?and through the anti-English rhetoric of these magazines, the theater appeared to support the nationalist pol itics of this audience. These concessions also expose the theater's shameless

courtship of the significant nationalist audiences already cultivated by publica tions like The Leader and organizations like the Gaelic League. In 1901, Yeats

wrote Gregory suggesting, '"Beltaine' should be a Gaelic propaganda paper this time & might really sell very well."23 Three days later, Gregory replied,

As to Beltaine, I am very strongly of the opinion that it should be printed and

published in Ireland. We must take advantage of every wind that blows, and the home industry people would be put in good humour.... And we want all the

aids to popularity we can get for the theater, having your enemies and Moore's

enemies and the Castie in general against us_24

In this ongoing discussion with Gregory about the nature of Beltaine, Yeats admitted that he imagined the journal as "a kind of Irish Fors Clavigera?25

Written, edited, and self-published by John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera (1871-1884) had been an irregular monthly publication of letters through which Ruskin advocated his eccentric Utopian social theories to working-class men. Even as he

champions the autonomy of the writer and the scope of artistic influence

through praise of Ruskin's obscure journal, Yeats paradoxically voices a desire to appeal to a working-class reading public who might read, adhere to, and enact the ideals espoused in Beltaine. Though of course, the occasional publi

21. W. B. Yeats, Editor's Note, Milligan, "The Last Feast of the Fianna," 21. 22. W. B.Yeats,'"The Last Feast of the Fianna,' 'Maeve,' and 'The Bending of the Bough' in Dublin," Beltaine, 3 (April, 1900), 4-5.

23. W. B.Yeats to Lady Gregory, 21 May 1901, Collected Letters, 3:72. 24. Lady Gregory to W. B. Yeats

" 24 May 1901, Collected Letters, 3:74m.

25. W. B.Yeats to Lady Gregory, 28 May 1901, Collected Letters, 3:75.

72




cation would never reach that audience owing to its level of discourse, its lim ited publication and distribution, and its prohibitive pricing structure.

The second series of the Abbey's occasional publications, Samhain, replaced Beltaine in 1901 and marked the transformation of a small coterie of literati to a legitimate theatrical company. This change, further evidenced by the associ ation of Frank and William Fay with the theater, altered once again how the

early Abbey imagined its audiences. In the inaugural issue of SamhainyYeaXs dis cussed the history of the Irish Literary Theatre: "We thought that three years would show whether the country desired to take up the project, and make it a

part of the national life, and that we, at any rate, could return to our proper work, in which we did not include theatrical management."26 From the incep tion of the ILT, Yeats, Gregory, and their associates presented their commitment to the theater as the unfortunate consequence of Ireland's purportedly weak

reading public. In her journal for early 1900, Gregory inscribed on the rear

inside cover this aside: "Trying to write in Ireland where there is no reading pub lic to respond is [like] trying to talk to sandbags."27 This ignorance of and dis dain for Irish reading publics was endemic, despite the country's high literacy rate and its flourishing press and other print media. Nonetheless, when in

December, 1902, Stephen Gwynn summarized the objectives of the Irish Nation

al Dramatic Society for the English Fortnightly Review, he explained,

Mr. Yeats and many others wanted to write for Ireland, not for England, if only

because they believed that any sound art must address itself to an audience

which is coherent enough to yield a response. The trouble was that Ireland had

lost altogether the desire to read, the desire for any art at all, except, perhaps, that

of eloquent speech - and even in that her taste was rapidly degenerating.28

Dramatic performance with its visual display and oral peregrinations might sal

vage the degenerating?or invent the nonexistent?Irish reading public. Thus,

in the second number of Samhain (October, 1902), Yeats advocated a complete

merger of the reading public and theater audience by insisting, "As we do not

think that a play can be worth acting, and not worth reading, all our plays will

be published in time."29

26. W. B. Yeats, "Windlestraws" Samhain, 1 (October, 1901), 3.

27. Lady Augusta Gregory, 1900, Lady Gregory's Diaries 1892-1902, ed. James Pethica (Gerrards

Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996), p. 260.

28. Stephen Gwynn, "The Irish Drama " Fortnightly Review, December, 1902. Reprinted in Irish Lit

erature) ed. Justin McCarthy (Chicago: DeBower-Elliot, 1904), io:xxiv.

29. W.B.Yeats,"Notes,"Sam/mi?,2(October, 1902),7.

73



The Linie Magazines of the Abbey Theatre

Even as he dreamed of an elite reading audience, Yeats continued to broad

cast appeals to the nationalist constituency. For instance, by mid-January, 1902,

the limited printing of SamhaMs first issue had done quite well. Of the 2,000

copies printed by the London publisher A. P. Watt, 1,682 were sold and 100 sent

for review to such English and Irish literary journals and newspapers as the

United Irishman, Quarterly Review, Pall Mall Gazette, and the Daily News. As a

result, the theater received a profit of ?5.14.3 from its sales, minus Watt's ten-per cent commission. Yeats ordered this profit donated to the Gaelic League in

Dublin on behalf of the ILT, suggesting also that a portion of the proceeds could be used as an award to the best Irish musical air invoking "The Irish Lit

erary Theatre" in its lyric since "that song would advertize us forever"30

Owing to a rising interest in cultural nationalism, if not to these aggressive

promotional efforts, public enthusiasm for Irish drama rapidly grew. Eager to

capitalize on this momentum, the Abbey acknowledged the diversity and the

increasingly politicized character of both its reading and theater audiences, while it continued to anticipate that a love of experimental drama would serve

as the glue binding together this disparate Irish public. In the third issue of

Samhain, Yeats wrote:

Our National Theatre must be so tolerant, and, if this not too wild a hope, find an audience so tolerant that the half dozen minds, who are likely to be the dra matic imagination of Ireland for this generation, may put their thoughts and their own characters into their work; and for that reason no one who loves the

arts, whether among Unionists or among the Patriotic Societies, should take

offence if we refuse all but every kind of patronage.31

As if to confirm these bipartisan aesthetic objectives, this issue of Samhain also contained the text for Douglas Hyde's Irish-language play accompanied by Gre

gory's English translation of it as The Poorhouse, along with a previously unpub lished new play, Synge's Riders to the Sea, rejected earlier by The Fortnightly

Review.32

The risk inherent in the repudiation of political patronage explains not

only the need to attract more ticket-buyers, but also the early necessity of com mercial advertisements to support the publication of the little magazines and the productions of the early Abbey. In its first issue, Beltaine advertised most

prominently an array of foreign books, including the Celtic Twilight prose of "Miss Fiona Macleod" (the pseudonym of William Sharp), an English transla

30. W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 19-20 January, 1902, Collected Letters, 3:147. 31. W. B.Yeats,"Notes" Samhain, 3 (September, 1903), 7. 32. J. M. Synge to Lady Gregory, 26 March 1903, The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 1:68.

74



The Link Magazines of the Abbey Theatre

tion of the French novel The Dark Way of Love by Charles le Goffie, and the works of George Meredith. The promotion of these foreign texts might seem to reinforce the publication's apolitical, modernist aesthetic, but this gesture is

qualified by less prominent advertisements on the back pages of the same issue

promoting native Irish texts from The Library of Literary History and from Charles Gavan Duffy's The New Irish Library, both published by the London

publishing house of T. Fisher Unwin. The second issue of Beltaine offered a

bounty of advertisements for both native and foreign texts, along with its first direct appeal to the nationalist consumer advertising "A Few Books Which Should Be Read By All Irishmen," including poetry by Yeats, Hyde's A Literary

History of Ireland, and an assortment of Irish history, myth, and ballads.33 Even in the advertisements, a high modernist fantasy surfaces in which a nation

might be consolidated through its consumption of high-quality Irish writing. Proving food that for thought alone would not satiate elite reading audiences, the first issue of Samhain printed a small advertisement for Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and cited positive reviews drawn only from English periodicals, along with a full-page advertisement for Kennedy's Bread. Later, a

select few products like the "Pianola-Piano," an upright piano player, and the "New I.D. A." liquid coffee would appear in the pages of The Arrow. For the most

part, however, the Abbey featured advertisements in its theater programs rather than its occasional publications. Regardless, these advertisements underscore

the relationship between commodity culture and cultural commodities for

readers of the occasional publications. While consistently introducing readers to a wide variety of intellectual

books and forward-thinking journals like the Daily Express and the Dome, the

Abbey's occasional publications also promoted the theater and its creative out

put. In the second number of Samhain, which celebrated the success of the pro duction of Cathleen ni Houlihan, Yeats announced,

Sealy, Bryers & Walker have still a few copies of last year's Samhain, and the three

volumes of its forerunner Beltaine, can still be got, bound up in one volume, for

a shilling, from the Unicorn Press, Cecil Court, St. Marks Lane, London. They

record the rise of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Any money made by the sale of

the present number of Samhain will be spent on the production of plays on Irish

subjects.34

This simple advertisement is interesting for several reasons: it insists on the per manence of the text in opposition to the evanescence of the theatrical event; it

disingenuously represents Beltaine as recording the history of the wide-scale

33- Advertisement, Beltaine, 2 (February, 1900), 30.

34. W. B.Yeats,"Notes,"Samhain, 2 (October, 1902), 10.

75




native dramatic movement, rather than describing specific developments in

the ILT, celebrations of Continental drama, and criticisms of national audiences;

and finally, it insists that members of the reading public necessarily constitute

the theater audience, that texts and plays literally and figuratively sustain each

other because to purchase the occasional magazine is to support the produc tions of the Abbey Yeats was careful to insist, however, that good literature had

no use value. In his notes for the third issue of Samhain, Yeats notes that "the

country people" who sang Hyde's early poems "read plenty of pamphlets and

grammars, but they disliked?as do other people in Ireland?serious reading,

reading that is an end and not a means, that gives us nothing but a beauty indif

ferent to our profuse purposes."35 Loathe to allow literature any utility, Yeats

obdurately champions a mode of cultural consumption that "gives us nothing"

practical, even as his journal hawks groceries to its readers.

The Abbey's efforts to appeal both to the elite reading public and to the

national theater audience took precedence in the December, 1904, number of

Samhain, the fourth of what would be seven numbers, which commemorated

the purchase by Annie Horniman of the space that housed the theater compa

ny.36 In this issue of Samhain, Yeats expressed gratitude to Horniman, but then

immediately assuaged his Irish nationalist audience and readership by insisting that the theater had been outfitted entirely by Irish labor and goods. While this

acknowledgement in Samhain suggested that Yeats sought to placate his nation alist audience, the magazine as a whole exposed the Abbey's increasingly hostile stance toward Irish political concerns and their influences on theater audi ences. Throughout this expanded commemorative issue?one that cost a full

shilling?Yeats insisted that art should not serve nationalist propaganda, and that the theater must teach its audience members to appreciate art-for-art's sake. In the October, 1902, issue of Samhain, Yeats had praised Hyde's The Twist

ing of the Rope, a work in Irish that the ILT had staged in 1901, for making plays "a necessary part in Irish propaganda."37 But two years later, in the 1904 issue of Samhain, Yeats revealed his anxiety about the influx of "propagandist plays" into the Irish dramatic movement.38 He insisted that the Abbey must cultivate "a

public that has learnt to care for a play because it is a play and not because it is serviceable to some cause."39 Here, Yeats described those who recognized the

35. W. B. Yeats, "Notes" Samhain, 3 (September, 1903), 6.

36. Between November 1904 and September 1905, the Ulster Literary Theatre published Uladh, a

journal modeled on the Abbey's occasional publications and providing editorial content on the Ulster literary revival along with poetry and plays. 37. W. B. Yeats, "Notes," Samhain, 2 (October, 1902), 3. 38. W. B. Yeats, "The Dramatic Movement," Samhain, 4 (December, 1904),9. 39. W.B.Yeats, "The Dramatic Movement "6.

76




real promise of the dramatic movement as "hundreds of men scattered through the world"40?a description that at this point in the theater's history could describe only an elite reading public?while he castigated the audience that gave an "easy cheer" to plays that "make no discoveries in human nature, but repeat the opinions of the audience, or the satire of its favourite newspapers."41 Now, not only those who follow the "theatre of amusement," but also the reading pub lic find themselves accused of a possible lack of discriminatory powers.

Yeats's critique signaled the Abbey's recognition of assorted reading publics, while further demonstrating its ambivalence toward the national citizenry. Nonetheless, the occasional publications celebrated the theater's mounting popularity, which had resulted in part from its successful efforts to cultivate an audience from nationalist communities. With this increased success, however, the Abbey began to take an even more aggressive stance against the politicized audience that resisted its efforts to stage more experimental plays.

In the following issue of Samhain (November, 1905), Yeats described an encounter with an audience member who criticized the theater for represent ing the less-than-heroic aspects of Irish culture. Yeats responded, "An audience

with National feeling is alive, at the worst it is alive enough to quarrel with."42 Yeats continued to insist that the audience of Irish National Theater, which was

here clearly synonymous with Irish nationalists, should embrace the ideals of

the Irish peasant as espoused by the Abbey, not by a politicized bourgeoisie. He

elaborated, "That is the peasant mind as I know it, delight in strong sensations

whether of beauty or of ugliness, in bare facts, and quite without sentimental

ity. The sentimental mind is the bourgeois mind, and it is this mind which came

into Irish literature with Gerald Griffin and later on with Kickham "43 By lam

basting the maudlin portraits of the Irish peasantry crafted by such nineteenth

century authors as Griffin and Kickham, Yeats reprimands the middle-class

readers who voraciously consumed these popular fictions. In Samhain, Yeats

contended that only by representing Irish life as it is?with its lack of senti

mentality, its ugliness, bare facts, petty faults, and perverted desires?could

either literature or drama help the nation.

Plausibly, the greatest critique of the Irish audience in the same issue came

from Lady Gregory, whose Spreading the News, published in Samhain after its

December, 1904, premiere, demonstrated the dangers of a purely oral commu

nity. Without readers, her play suggests, an indigenous community suffers from

gossip, lies, and other misperceptions that lead inevitably to internal struggle,

40. W. B, Yeats, "The Dramatic Movement," 9.

41. W. B. Yeats, "The Dramatic Movement" 10.

42. W.'B. Yeats, "Notes and Opinions"Samhain, 5 (November, 1905), 5.

43. W. B. Yeats, "Notes and Opinions," 6.

77




unwarranted imprisonment, and threats of emigration. Again, it becomes clear

that the Abbey saw its project, both in print and on stage, as one of disseminat

ing critical work about the Irish public to the Irish public and, thereby, in its lit

tle magazines the Abbey fulfilled the modernist imperative to ipater le bourgeois.

Yet The Arrow, the third and last of the Abbey's occasional publications,

appealed directly to the Irish middle classes. In The Arrow inaugural issue

(October, 1906), Yeats described the upcoming season as one that contained

something for every theatergoer, including "Irish historical and peasant plays, one play of industrial life, one of lower middle class life in a small country town,

besides certain world-famous masterpieces" and highlighted plays that would

appeal to an urban nationalist audience, an audience only marginally interest

ed in Continental drama.44 In this issue of The Arrow, the first of five numbers

published from 1906 to 1909, Yeats distanced himself from the ideal he had

articulated in the first issue of Beltaine, where the Abbey's audience was to be

composed of "the right people" who would appreciate plays that were "remote,

spiritual and ideal."45 In part, The Arrow's address to the middle classes

acknowledged the fact that the National Theatre Society, Ltd. (NTS) had, as

announced in the magazine, reduced the price of seats in the pit to 6d and the

price of its subscription rates in order to cultivate a larger audience.46

Having accepted that Dublin had reading publics already in place, The Arrow

may be the theater's effort to create a little magazine for that increasingly mid dle-class audience, the nationalist reading public that it had chastized in Samhain for consuming only the opinion-riddled newspapers. By publishing both jour nals concurrently, Yeats also allowed that the theater audience and the reading public might coexist peacefully, if in separate realms of publication, for the NTS directors. Not surprisingly, at the moment the NTS made a gesture to acknowl

edge overtly a mainstream nationalist audience, Yeats attempted to discipline and control that audience, to school these middle-class playgoers on theater eti

quette. In the November, 1906, second number of The Arrow, he demanded that the audience arrive on time since "[t]he entrance of people after the com

mencement of a play, is a constant annoyance in Irish and English Theatre."47 In

44- W. B. Yeats, "The Season's Work," The Arrow, 1 (20 October 1906), 1.

45. W. B.Yeats,"TheTheatre," Beltaine, 1 (May, 1899), 21.

46. The Arrow, 1 (20 October 1906), 4. This first issue of The Arrow attends more obviously to the ater business than its predecessors: notes not only explain the 6d seats in the pit, but also announce that the theater's heating has been improved and that theatergoers can help mitigate "our principle expense... advertisement" by signing up to be mailed free copies of forthcoming issues of this jour nal, which will contain notices of future productions. 47. W. B. Yeats, The Arrow 2 (24 November 1906), 1.




a very short issue of Samhain published one month later in December, 1906, Yeats in like fashion asserted his belief that the artist, not the audience, controlled the theater. He wrote, "All true arts, as distinguished from their commercial and

mechanical imitation, are a festival where it is the fiddler who calls the tune."48 But the third number of The Arrow, published two months later in Febru

ary, 1907, revealed that, in fact, the fiddler does not always call the tune. This issue focused on the controversy surrounding the premiere of Synge's The Play boy of the Western World. The evening this play opened, it was booed and jeered by a nationalist audience deeply offended by what it perceived as Synge s por trayal of the Irish peasantry as a wild bunch of parricidal, hypocritical, and foul

mouthed buffoons. In the first issue of The Arrow that engaged with the con

troversy surrounding The Playboy Yeats launched a full scale attack on the audience whose "old Puritanism, the old bourgeois dislike of power and reali

ty have not changed, even when they are called by some Gaelic name."49 In the second number of The Arrow dedicated to The Playboy Yeats contended that

The failure of the audience to understand this powerful and strange work has been the one serious failure of our movement, and it could not have happened but that the greater number of those who came to shout down the play were no

regular part of our audience at all, but members of parties and societies whose

main interests are political.50

Rather than condemn the nationalist audience as a whole, Yeats divided the

audience into subcommunities of "natural censors" who could appreciate the

play, and the rowdy young nationalists whom he claimed lacked the "eloquence and knowledge to expound."51

Forced once again to acknowledge an obstreperous national audience, Yeats

reproached these politicized spectators for being interlopers in the sacred

domain of experimental native art. In The Arrow, the Abbey returns to the high modernist fantasy of a disinterested public, the very readership imagined by lit

tle magazines, but in such a way as to expose the thorny contradictions charac

terizing an avant-garde inflected by cultural nationalism. In "An Explanation,"

Lady Gregory announced the Abbey's intention to perform in England and

accused the Dublin theater audience with its "organized interruption and orga nized force" of driving the company from Ireland.52 While Gregory attributed

the flight to published attacks on the company, strangely she cited in this essay condemnations strictly from the English press, intimating that only an Irish

48. W. B. Yeats, Samhain, 6 (December, 1906), 3.

49. W. B. Yeats, "The Controversy over the Playboy," The Arrow, 3 (23 February 1907}, 2.

50. W. B.Yeats, The Arrow, 4 (1 June 1907), 2.

51. Yeats (1 June 1907), 2.

52. Lady Augusta Gregory, "An Explanation," The Arrow, 4 (1 June 1907), 2.

79




audience could fully appreciate Irish art, even as she announced the Abbey would seek either "libel action or some calm audience" in London or Oxford.53

This strange confusion of playgoers and readers, performance and text, England and Ireland did not abate; Lady Gregory once more defended The Playboy by

insisting, "the play was never acted as it was printed" before Dublin audiences

and that this tradition would be upheld before English audiences.54 She not only asserted the receptive similarities for English and Irish audiences, but also cel

ebrated the authority of the original text over the bowdlerized production. As

a result, Gregory diluted the menace she believed The Playboy presented its

Dublin audiences, the "foreshadowing of what will happen if emigration goes on carrying off, year by year, the strongest, the most healthy, the most ener

getic."55 While it might be tempting to read this statement simply as the travel

ing company's threat to abandon their Irish audiences, Gregory actually seems

to suggest that the Abbey's art would be better understood if it were unmediat

ed by the place and occasion of performance. Her ideal audience would simply

purchase the text, read the reviews, or locate the most recent copy of an occa

sional publication to compile a fuller understanding of the play and its recep tion. The cultural injuries produced by the lack of an indigenous culture and a

pool of native talent drained away by emigration are rendered obsolete by the

promise of print culture.

Nonetheless, the controversy over The Playboy revealed that the Abbey rec

ognized it must retain its nationalist theater audience in order to survive, and it

also powerfully foregrounded the disjunction between the theater audience and the reading public. To those invested in the theater arts, like William and Frank

Fay, writers like Synge and Yeats failed to take into account the difference between a theater audience and the reading public. According to William Fay, the Playboy riots stemmed from Synge's refusal to see "that there is all the difference between a printed story that one reads to oneself and the same story told as a play to a

mixed audience of varying degrees of intelligence... it was years too soon for our audiences to appreciate [his characters] as dramatic creations "56 Similarly, Frank

Fay explained to Synge why the company had staged his controversial plays less

frequently than the work of Yeats or Gregory by claiming, "Those who write have

always the reading public; but those who act are useless without an audience."57

53. Gregory, "An Explanation," 2.

54. Gregory, "An Explanation,7'3. 55. Gregory, "An Explanation," 3.

56. William Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre: An Autobiographical Record (New York: Harcourt, Brace, i935)> pp. 212-213.

57. Frank Fay to J. M. Synge, March, 1907. Cited in David Greene and Edward M. Stephens, John Millington Synge 1871-1909 (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 258.

8o




By looking at accounts of the riots in the Abbey's occasional magazines, we can see more clearly the discrepancies between the theater audience and the read

ing public: the theater audience might sabotage the premiere of the play, but in "the long run," as Synge himself predicted, the reading public would assure his

work status as a masterpiece.58

Because they were aimed at cultivating a theater audience from a reading public, these occasional publications allow us to trace the way in which the

Abbey first imagined its audience as an erudite reading public and how the insti tution responded once it encountered its diverse, politicized theater audience.

Initially, the theater's founders assumed that elite and mainstream audiences,

composed both of readers and theatergoers, constituted one audience of "all Irish people"?an ideal soon exposed as illusory. The contents of the occasion al publications confirm that the theater organizers then presumed they could

integrate seamlessly these two publics, though the premiere of The Playboy in

1907 revealed this to be an impossible goal. In 1908, Yeats wrote to Horniman in

order to refuse her request that he bring his plays to England:

Though I wish for a universal audience, in play-writing there is always an imme

diate audience also. If I am to try and find an immediate audience in England I would fail through lack of understanding on my part, perhaps through lack of

sympathy... I shall write for my own people?whether in love or hate of them

matters little.59

In Yeats's view, the universal audience?the reading public that loves the good books of any country and can ensure the life of a masterpiece?comprised one

public. Though notoriously self-contradictory, Yeats here announced that he

had come to understand "his own people" as a second public, a different but

equally important audience that he must write for "in love or hate" in order to

instruct them on how to build a nation. The modernist disdain for the masses

is here qualified by nationalism's celebration of the folk which, for Yeats, man

ifested itself in a call to produce and promote his written work for diverse

publics. It is probably no coincidence that when Yeats acknowledged that these two

publics differed, he edited and published only one more issue of an Abbey occasional publication. This seemingly ultimate issue of The Arrow, like its pre

decessor addressing the controversies surrounding Synge's comedy, justified the 1909 staging of Shaw's The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, which had been

58. J. M. Synge to Maire O'Neill, 23 March 1907, Letters to Motif- John Millington Synge to Make

O'Neill 1906-1909 (Cambridge: Belknap, i97i)> P- u6.

59. W.B. Yeats to Annie Horniman, (Wade dates as early 1908), The Letters ofW. B. Yeats, ed. Allan

Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954)? p- 501.

8i




banned in England. A gesture to win back nationalist audiences, this issue was

composed almost exclusively of material already published: the directors5 state

ment on their refusal to withdraw Shaw's play, a letter from Shaw to the Abbey

directors, and an article condemning censorship from The Nation. Only Yeats's

short coda on "The Religion of Blanco Posnet," refuting the English Censor's

charges of blasphemy, was original Excerpting material already in print had

been a regular practice since the inception of the Abbey's occasional magazines. With the advent of recent controversies?and likely the consuming demands of

theater management?the editors of these journals had come to rely more

heavily on these reprints and, consequently, they looked more like intellectual

reviews than little magazines. This increasingly review-like nature, along with

the intense attention to material facts like production dates and cast lists, pre vents these later issues from being labeled little magazines. After a decade of

erratically publishing its occasional publications, the Abbey appeared to have

determined that to succeed, its institutional goals would have to be geared toward building a theater, a repertory, a body of skilled performers, and a reg ular, paying audience. With that solid commitment to a change in objectives, confirmed by the theater's mounting concentration on international tours, the

efforts to cultivate an elite audience through these journals fell away.

With few exceptions, the early Abbey's three occasional publications?Beltaine, Samhain, and The Arrow?regularly, if sometimes ambivalently, displayed the hallmarks of even the most conservative definition of the modernist little mag azine. Through the work of the editor and contributors, they provided experi

mental literature and unorthodox opinion that challenged conventional Irish taste. They represented the aesthetics of the Abbey as an institution, most force

fully at the beginning and end of their publication runs, as counter-hegemon ic. They published work of quality that could not find publication elsewhere.

They provided a wide variety of content and, consequently, appeared sometimes to lack a central organizing principle beyond their obvious association with the

Abbey. They were directed towards small, intelligent reading audiences, and they were short-lived.

The long-belated final issue of The Arrow, edited by Lennox Robinson and

published in the summer of 1939 to commemorate Yeats's death, allows for a brief reconsideration of the occasional publication as a little magazine, and further explains its place in mass consumer culture and its intended audience.

Throughout their truncated histories, Beltaine, Samhain, and The Arrow close

ly followed the format of little magazines, but struggled to reconcile their con tent appealing to an elite reading public and their reception context defined by a broad national audience. Published just before the onset of World War II,

82



The Linie Magazines of the Abbey Theatre

which, arguably, signaled the end of literary modernism's heyday, the com memorative issue suggested a strange transformation in the relationship between Ireland's elite reading public and the national theater audience. This issue, unlike its predecessors, is decorated with the insignia of the Abbey The atre, the wolfhound trademark that always appeared on the cover of the theater's

programs but never in its occasional magazines. Just as this image insists on the "brand" of the Abbey, so too the content celebrates Yeats as the "brand name"

signaling Ireland's literary and cultural preeminence. In doing so, it confirms the

Abbey's position as the principal national theater and congratulates the insti tution for successfully promoting its art and aims internationally by means of

eulogies honoring its most famous founder. The accolades accorded to Yeats's innovative artistic vision by artists like

Austin Clarke, John Masefield, Lennox Robinson, and W. J. Turner center large ly on Yeats's capacity to engage variant audiences of artists and intellectuals, readers and playgoers, and nationalists and foreigners. Yet an advertisement in the final pages of this last issue of The Arrow provides stunning evidence of the

lively dynamic between modernism and mass culture, a relationship that ulti

mately allowed for the Abbey's increasingly diverse audiences and its ongoing success. A quarter-page advertisement for Davy Byrne's pub announced the venue's address and its dates of operation, 1889-1939, a span of existence almost commensurate to that of the Abbey. Just as Masefield sanctioned Yeats as "the most poetical figure of this time,"60 the advertisement for Davy Byrne's relies on

O'Flaherty's Travellers' Guide to confirm its provisions of "good company and

good liquor."61 But the endorsement commanding the top portion of this adver

tisement suggests, through its central location, its authority and reads, ec?Davy

Byrne's Moral Pub' (Jas. Joyce in Ulysses)." In his study of the little magazine, Mark Morrisson argues for the inextri

cable ties between the mass market and elite reading publics, but ultimately con

cedes that modernist authors in England and America failed to harness effec

tively the attention of the mass public and thus garner broad support for their

aesthetic and cultural objectives. In contradistinction, this advertisement sug

gests a very different relationship between the oppositional art of modernism

and the mass market. Now, the commercial culture of the modern Irish state

eagerly invokes the cachet associated with oppositional texts for elite readers in

order to sell commodities to the masses, even if, in this particular ease, those

masses are likely only clusters of those who admire Yeats. The "right people" cel

ebrated throughout the Abbey's occasional publications were once defined as

60. John Masefield, "William Butler Yeats " The Arrow: W. B. Yeats Commemorative Number (Sum

mer 1939), 5.

61. Advertisement, The Arrow: W. B. Yeats Commemorative Number (Summer, 1939)? 22.




specific groups resistant to popular pastimes and mainstream tastes, but now

apparently any reader might join these ranks not by wading through Yeats's

prose but simply by drinking in shared time and space with the reading audi

ence lured to Davy Byrne's through this advertisement. The Arrow's approach to

its audiences suggests that the reading public through its affinity for experi mental literature does not provide exclusively the elite kernel of the new Irish

nation?they also supply a target audience, a consumer demographic, for the

broader market.

Read in light of the promotional strategies characterizing not only the occa

sional publications but also many other institutional practices of the Abbey Theatre, the advertisement for Davy Byrne's in the final issue of The Arrow

reveals that the theater from its inception invoked both high art and popular culture in its quest to bring Irish people together in shared time and space to

consume their particular mode of cultural nationalism. In Material Modernism:

The Politics of the Page, George Bornstein asks his fellow modernists to attend

to "examining modernism in its original sites of production and in the contin

ually shifting physicality of its texts" to compose "alternative constructions" of

this cultural movement.62 By heeding his suggestions, we can observe in the

form and content of the Abbey's occasional publications overt similarities to the

little magazine, a publication generally and strictly considered the terrain of

such prototypical modernist authors and editors as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Margaret Anderson. In particular, the Abbey's "little magazines" demonstrate one of many ways in which the theories and practices of interna tional modernism and the Irish Literary Revival dovetail. As such, they encour

age us to reconsider the dynamic between mass culture and modernism in a

specifically Irish context, which in turn allows us to locate the limits of the anti

commercial, antipopulist rhetoric espoused by the Abbey and to regard more

critically this institution and its vexed relationships to its assorted audiences of

readers, spectators, and customers.

THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY CROSS

62. George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

2001) 5. See also Yug Mohit Chaudhry, Yeats, The Irish Revival, and the Politics of Print (Cork: Cork

University Press, 2001).

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Documents

Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre