Donagh MacDonagh

• Born: November 22, 1912
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: January 1, 1968
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

Other Literary Forms

In addition to writing plays, Donagh MacDonagh collaborated with A. J. Potter in a ballet, Careless Love, and an opera, Patrick, neither of which has been published. MacDonagh published two essays—one on his father, Thomas MacDonagh, in 1945, and one on James Joyce, in 1957—and was the author of several short stories. He often wrote new lyrics for old Irish ballads, some of which are collected in The Hungry Grass (1947) and A Warning to Conquerors (1968), two volumes of his poetry. With Lennox Robinson, MacDonagh coedited The Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1958) and, at the time of his death, was working on a dictionary of Dublin slang, which remains unfinished. The dictionary and the rest of MacDonagh’s personal library and papers became the property of the Irish University Press.

Most important is MacDonagh’s poetry, published in four volumes: Twenty Poems (1933), Veterans and Other Poems (1941), The Hungry Grass, and A Warning to Conquerors. Even his earliest poems are essentially dramatic and therefore foreshadow his later plays. Some, such as “Dublin Made Me” and “The Hungry Grass,” are essentially mood pieces calculated to evoke in the reader precise feelings, such as patriotic allegiance to a proud, unbowed city or the nameless, all-encompassing fear of straying into a cursed area. Other poems are character sketches or dramatic dialogues apparently indebted to Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Major themes of MacDonagh’s drama also appear in his early poetry. In “Alleged Cruelty,” for example, MacDonagh writes that we are all torn “with longings/ For something undefinable and wild,” a recurrent thought in both the author’s poems and his plays, often symbolized by the beauty of an unattainable woman. In contrast to such longings, our real lives, the poet asserts, are more like a horse, freighted with each passing year, endlessly running around the same track, or like “the changeless sound/ Of an engine running.” This view leads MacDonagh to see past, present, and future as the same and therefore to accept and make the most of an inherently flawed world. Allied with this perception is a strong note of resignation, perhaps even fatalism, that creeps into MacDonagh’s poetry from time to time, most notably in “The Veterans,” one of his best poems. Like William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” “The Veterans” examines the famous Easter Rising of 1916. For his part in this rebellion, MacDonagh’s father, Thomas MacDonagh, was executed on May 3, 1916. Whereas Yeats questions the human cost of this Irish rebellion, Donagh MacDonagh, one generation later, questions its legacy. Domesticated by time and history, the Easter Rising has become “petrified” and academic, at best a shadowy memory of what it once was.

Two other themes are worth mentioning, one traditional and the other radically modern. Like the Elizabethan sonneteers, especially William Shakespeare, MacDonagh sometimes envisioned life as a struggle between love and the ravages of time. In his poems and some of his best plays, “Joy” and “the heart’s extravagance” are offered as experiences that temporarily halt the inexorable corrosion of time. More contemporary is MacDonagh’s recognition that culture, knowledge, and thought are all “varnish,” under which lurks the primitive beast in all of us, from which springs “all wild desirable barbarities” and “time’s rat teeth.”

Achievements

Although Donagh MacDonagh was a poet, playwright, and scholar, a writer of ballads and short stories, the coauthor of a ballet and an opera, and a skillful and knowledgeable editor of Irish poetry, his real achievements are hard to gauge. This is true for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of the Irish playwrights and poets who followed William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, George Russell (Æ), and Sean O’Casey is insufficient. Consequently, no complete history of modern Irish drama, no adequate bibliography, and few good anthologies exist. Indeed, many important plays of this period, at least one of which is by MacDonagh, remain unedited and unpublished. Other than a brief but trenchant study by Robert Hogan, the dean of modern Irish studies, few scholarly evaluations of MacDonagh have appeared. The second reason for the neglect of MacDonagh’s work is more personal. His father, Thomas MacDonagh, has been the subject of numerous articles and two critical biographies, and the political and historical importance of the father has tended to overshadow the literary achievements of the son.

Some tentative judgments of Donagh MacDonagh, however, can be made. He was a better poet and playwright than his more famous father, and he, along with T. S. Eliot, deserves pride of place for attempting to resurrect poetic drama in the modern theater. In fact, MacDonagh’s verse is more flexible and lively than Eliot’s, and it has a much broader range, from ballad forms to rhyming couplets, from blank verse to colloquial Irish expressions, à la Synge. Happy as Larry is the best-known Irish verse play of recent memory, and some of MacDonagh’s other plays, though almost completely unknown, are even better. His plays are notable for their deft characterization, whether sketched in detail or painted with a broad brush. Fame largely eluded MacDonagh during his lifetime, although he was elected to the Irish Academy of Letters, saw his verse play Happy as Larry translated into twelve European languages, and gained great popularity as a broadcaster on Radio Éireann, where he sang and recited folk ballads and ballad operas, often his own, and where he explained the significance and importance of Irish songs and poetry to a large and enthusiastic listening audience. Selected by Robinson to help edit The Oxford Book of Irish Verse, MacDonagh also contributed a learned and insightful introduction to the collection.

Biography

Born in Dublin on November 22, 1912, Donagh MacDonagh made the most of a life that was singularly unlucky and troubled. His father, Thomas MacDonagh, the great Irish patriot, was executed when Donagh was only three years old, and shortly afterward the young boy contracted tuberculosis. On July 9, 1917, only fifteen months after his father’s death, Muriel MacDonagh, Donagh’s mother, drowned while attempting to swim to an island off the shore of Skerries, an ocean resort close to Dublin. Thereafter, the custody of Donagh and his sister Barbara was contested for some time by the families of their father and mother, apparently in part because of a disagreement about whether the children should be reared as Catholics.

In time, Donagh was sent off to school, first to Belvedere College, where James Joyce had been a student some years earlier, and then to University College, Dublin, where he was part of a brilliant student generation that included such future notables as Niall Sheridan, Brian O’Nolan (who is best known under his pen names, Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen), Denis Devlin, Charles Donnelly—MacDonagh’s close friend who died in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War—and Cyril Cusack, who later became an accomplished actor.

MacDonagh took both his bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees at University College, Dublin, and became a barrister in 1935. He practiced law until 1941, when he was named as a district justice for County Dublin, a post that required much traveling in the countryside.

At the time of his death on New Year’s Day, 1968, MacDonagh was serving as a justice for the Dublin Metropolitan Courts. MacDonagh was twice married. His first wife drowned while she was taking a bath, and his second wife, who survived him, later choked to death on a chicken bone.

Analysis

Donagh MacDonagh’s plays derive from three distinct sources. The first of these is the double heritage of the early Abbey Theatre: Yeats’s romantic, poetic drama and the more realistic plays of Edward Martyn. All of MacDonagh’s major works are comedies—even Lady Spider is technically a comedy—but in each one, the author offers a particular blend of realism and fantasy, with one or the other usually predominating. Another important source for MacDonagh’s drama is his deep love of poetry and various verse forms. As a practicing poet, he attempted to revive the marriage of poetry and drama, experimenting with different types of verse that he thought were appropriate for and pleasing to theater audiences. The third source of MacDonagh’s art is his great learning, above all his familiarity with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, especially Shakespeare, and his scholar’s interest in old Irish poetry and ballads and in various Irish dialects and slang.

Happy as Larry

All of these influences are present in MacDonagh’s first published drama, Happy as Larry, his most popular and successful play. Technically accomplished, Happy as Larry has been described as “a ballad opera without music,” and the definition is a good one. The rhythms of well-known Irish ballads and the use of homey Irish words and phrases provide a constant undercurrent of familiar patterns that make the verse easy to listen to or to read. MacDonagh employs short, medium, and long lines of verse, together with musical repetitions and refrains, to which he adds simplicity and clarity of diction. The result is a verse play of uncommon pleasure.

The plot of Happy as Larry is highly fanciful and melodramatic. Six tailors, one of whom is Larry’s grandson, are located on the outer stage and introduce the story. Larry, a hard-drinking, fast-talking Irishman, happens on a young woman of about twenty who is kneeling by the grave of Johnny, her recently deceased husband. She is fanning the dirt on Johnny’s grave, for her late husband made her promise not to marry again until the clay on his grave is dry. Intrigued and amused, Larry invites the young widow home to have a cup of tea. Meanwhile, at Larry’s house, the local Doctor is attempting to seduce Mrs. Larry. Soon after Larry and the widow arrive, Seamus, the pharmacist, enters with a vial of poison, ordered by the evil Doctor, who puts it in Larry’s drink. Poor Larry dies from the poison, and the shocked and bereaved Mrs. Larry quickly plans a wake, during which the nefarious Doctor presses his suit. Soon Mrs. Larry weakens and agrees to marry the Doctor, even though her husband’s corpse is not yet cold.

Outraged, the six tailors, with the help of the three Fates, travel back in time to join the party at Larry’s wake, where they decide to take a hand in events by using the Doctor’s own poison against him. The unsuspecting Doctor toasts his future happiness and promptly dies. Seamus convinces Mrs. Larry to draw some blood from Larry’s corpse in order to give the Doctor a transfusion, which, according to the pharmacist, will bring the Doctor back to life. Mrs. Larry agrees but faints and dies when she sees Larry’s blood. Incredibly, the blood she drains from Larry contains the poison that killed him, so Larry revives, believing that he is the victim of a monumental hangover. The young widow consoles Larry over the loss of his wife and talks him out of a life of debauchery and dissipation. The second tailor ends the play by telling the audience that Larry will marry the young widow and live happily ever after.

MacDonagh provides a cast of wonderfully drawn comic types to complement his fantastic plot. Mrs. Larry talks too much, bosses her poor husband around, and is somehow capable of delivering a highly metaphysical eulogy for her dead husband: “Empty on their racks the suits are hanging,/Mere foolish cloth whose meaning was their wearer.” Still, she is a loving and faithful wife until Larry’s death. The Gravedigger, wholly superfluous to the plot, is right out of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet; he is a comic reductionist and a walking, talking memento mori whose every line is a reminder that death is both unpredictable and unconquerable. The young widow is the Gravedigger’s opposite number, healthy and buxom, good-humored and witty, and convinced that she can conquer death—as, in a way, she does, by marrying again and refusing to be a widow for the rest of her life. Larry is the archetypal henpecked husband, decent enough and faithful to his wife, but not above a little flirting on the side.

The star of the show is MacDonagh’s evil Doctor, a hilarious combination of Oil Can Harry and Groucho Marx. MacDonagh endows the Doctor with the spurious eloquence of a first-class rake and with the persuasive powers of John Donne. Arguing at one point that love is religion because God is love, the Doctor slyly turns to Mrs. Larry and croons, “Let us pray/Together, Mrs. Larry.” Later, this schemer touts the virtues of friendship to Mrs. Larry, arguing that since friendship transcends passion, his kiss should be allowed to linger. When the six tailors succeed in poisoning him, the audience is sure to cheer: He has been hoisted with his own petard.

The Doctor’s fellow in crime, the unctuous pharmacist, spotlights MacDonagh’s major theme in the play. Seamus’s presence in this comedy is a kind of learned joke: The Greek pharmakos means both remedy and poison, just as the word “drug” even today carries both a positive and a negative sense. Thus, infusing this delightful comedy is a vision of the world in which nearly everything cuts two ways, and in which rigid views, either of proper conduct or of the opposite sex, need to be broadened and softened. Except for the Doctor and his henchman Seamus, everyone in Happy as Larry is a mingled yarn—both good and bad together.

The play gently asks us to support a widow’s right to remarry. According to custom, especially in Catholic Ireland, widows do better to honor the memory of their dead husbands by not remarrying—Mrs. Larry makes exactly this point to the young widow—yet such expectations are both unrealistic and cruel, as Mrs. Larry discovers in the course of the play. MacDonagh endorses the young widow’s wish to marry again rather than follow the outdated suicide of Dido or the self-immolation of Indian wives, both mentioned at the start of the play.

Allied to the theme of remarriage is MacDonagh’s attempt to adjust male attitudes toward women. Though written twenty years before the rebirth of feminism in the 1960’s, the play poses a key question about Larry’s two wives: Which is bad and which is good? The answer is that both are essentially good. The play approves of Mrs. Larry’s wish for companionship after Larry’s death, though it does not approve of the way the Doctor manipulates her, and Mrs. Larry’s attempt to save the Doctor, though it fails, stems from the reasonable premise that it is better to save a life than to let someone die. Likewise, the lusty young widow’s wish to dry her husband’s grave quickly is rewarded at the end of the play when MacDonagh allows her to marry Larry.

The second tailor, Larry’s grandson, begins as a misogynist—“Woman curses every plan”—but ends by praising the many virtues of the young widow and by wishing that his own son “may be as happy as Larry.” Like the second tailor, the audience learns the need for tolerance and empathy in an imperfect world.

Step-in-the-Hollow

Step-in-the-Hollow, like Happy as Larry, is an experimental play. Local dialects and lively, contemporary turns of phrase energize this comedy, which, again like its predecessor, contains a wide variety of verse forms. In both technique and construction, however, Step-in-the-Hollow is superior to Happy as Larry and was a great success when it premiered at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on March 11, 1957. Parts of the play are written in rhyming couplets, a difficult and demanding form that MacDonagh uses with great skill and to good effect. The verse is flexible enough for the actors to avoid the singsong monotony that can vitiate a long series of couplets, and MacDonagh also employs the couplet form wisely: to highlight important moments in the play and as a device to underscore the character of Julia O’Sullivan, the local harridan who threatens to destroy Justice Redmond O’Hanlon, the main character.

The play is so well constructed that it moves along with great speed, full of interest and crackling with life and vitality. MacDonagh deftly uses the first act to introduce the main complications one by one. First, the audience learns that a government inspector is on his way to evaluate the courtroom procedures of Justice O’Hanlon. Then Julia O’Sullivan appears, with her daughter, aptly named Teazie, in tow, demanding that the Justice try Crilly Duffy, a local boy, for compromising her daughter’s virtue. Throughout, the reactions of the Justice’s cohorts—Molly, the Sergeant, and the Clerk—establish their essential characters for the audience, while MacDonagh holds back the main antagonists, Justice Redmond O’Hanlon and Sean O’Fenetic, the government inspector. When the Judge finally enters, MacDonagh adds a third complication: An old man, much like Redmond O’Hanlon, was in Teazie’s room before Crilly Duffy entered.

Act 2 consists of two short scenes in which the case of O’Sullivan versus Duffy is argued and almost resolved. With the Inspector watching every move, Justice O’Hanlon tries as hard as he can to prevent the truth from being discovered, but Julia O’Sullivan discovers that O’Hanlon, not Duffy, is the real villain and storms into the courtroom to accuse the Justice. Overcome with emotion and gin, she builds to a climax at great length, allowing O’Hanlon to adjourn the court and whisk away the Inspector before Julia can name the man who compromised her little Teazie.

Act 3 belongs wholly to Molly Nolan, who conceives and executes a plan that saves the Justice, the Sergeant, and the Clerk, while ensuring her own future as the heir of Redmond O’Hanlon and the new wife of the Inspector. Skillful, effective, and satisfying, the conclusion to Step-in-the-Hollow is both unexpected and delightful.

The twin themes of this play are love and justice. The symbol of playful, worldly love is Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, prominently displayed in Justice Redmond O’Hanlon’s apartment, the location for acts 1 and 3. During the play, MacDonagh examines different kinds of love: the May-December infatuation of the Justice for Teazie; the young love of Crilly and Teazie, who are to be married by the end of the play; the romantic, yet imprudent, love of the Sergeant for Molly; the lascivious love of the Justice for Molly; the liquor-induced love of the Clerk for Molly; and, finally, the birth of the Inspector’s love for Molly, which she both induces and accepts in act 3.

In some ways, Molly is an unlikely heroine—as clever and resourceful as Shakespeare’s comic heroines, whom she clearly resembles but with much less chastity. She took a tumble in the hay with the Sergeant once, and the full extent of her duties for the Justice clearly exceed those of a paid housekeeper. Moreover, Molly is no starry-eyed, empty-headed girl, such as Teazie; rather, she wants respectability and a good fortune, as well as the passion of first love, all of which the Inspector finally provides. Molly is not above asking, “What’s in it for me?” and her mixture of love and prudence carries the day for herself and for others.

Molly’s attitude toward love is highly practical, not extreme. The need for a practical, reasonable approach to justice is the play’s complementary theme. Justice Redmond O’Hanlon and Inspector Sean O’Fenetic represent radical attitudes toward the law, neither of which can be accepted. Once a good scholar and student of the law, Justice O’Hanlon has been worn down by thirty years on the bench and has become the very embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins that justice seeks to prevent and punish. On the other hand, the God-fearing Inspector, sworn to temperance, is an essentially innocent and sterile advocate of governmental rules and regulations that often hinder instead of promote the impartial administration of justice. Molly, rather than the Justice or the Inspector, leads the audience to a better understanding of justice and the law. She puts the Inspector in the same compromising position in which Crilly Duffy found Justice Redmond O’Hanlon. The point is simple and clear: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Mercy and forgiveness, and a second chance, are the better parts of justice.

As in his other plays, MacDonagh’s characters are exceptionally well drawn—from the gin-soaked Julia O’Sullivan and the voyeuristic Mary Margaret Allen to the inhibited Inspector, who, with Molly’s help, discovers at the end of the play that he has always been afraid of women. Above all, there is Justice Redmond O’Hanlon, an authentic triumph of the literary imagination. Old in years yet young at heart, limping after his last exploit with Teazie yet still chasing after women, this fat Justice is a liar, a cheat, and a scoundrel, but his cleverness and humor are endearing qualities that help him retain audience sympathy. He derives from Sir John Falstaff, as does the basic conflict of Step-in-the-Hollow: The clash between the Inspector and the Justice is an Irish version of the contest between the Lord Chief Justice and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II (pr. 1598). Moreover, some of the pathos and melancholy of Shakespeare’s work creep into MacDonagh’s play: Justice O’Hanlon’s startling admission, “An old man knows what’s lost,” echoes Falstaff’s frank confession in Henry IV, Part II, “I am old, I am old.”

In part, however, O’Hanlon is an alter ego of the author himself, who also spent many years on the bench in Ireland. Though obvious differences exist between the playwright and his creation, a Justice who quotes T. S. Eliot and who displays above his bench the harp of Ireland, the symbol of old Irish poetry and music, shares something with MacDonagh. One suspects, for example, that O’Hanlon’s wish to replace the rules of evidence with common sense echoes the wish of his creator, and the Justice’s view that the law seems bent on mystifying common people may also have been shared by MacDonagh.

The Justice provides a sobering counterpoint to an otherwise happy ending. As the curtain is about to fall, O’Hanlon stands alone, looking out the window at Molly and the Inspector as they leave to get married. To grow old, the Justice muses, is to gain money, place, and power but to lose forever carefree youth and the chance to be in love again. “I can’t complain” is O’Hanlon’s last line, but the audience knows better.

Lady Spider

Lady Spider is MacDonagh’s most daring and ambitious play, in which he offers his version of the Deirdre legend that has obsessed Irish poets and playwrights for more than one hundred years. The tragedy of Deirdre is to the Irish imagination as Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) is to the English, and it is fair to say that MacDonagh handles the love of Deirdre and Naoise much as William Shakespeare treats the story of Troilus and Cressida. Lady Spider minimizes romance and fantasy by pushing comedy to the limits of realism. In short, MacDonagh demythologizes myth by making it modern, psychological, and political. The result is as brilliant as it is unsettling, a fable for modern times.

The story of Deirdre is part of the Red Branch Cycle of ancient Irish tales. During the reign of Conor, King of Ulster, a female child named Deirdre is born who, according to prophecy, will bring down the House of Usna and Emain Macha, the palace of King Conor. Conor refuses to kill the child; instead, he sends her into the wilderness to be brought up by Leabharcham, a nurse. Deirdre, whose name means “alarm” or “troubler,” grows up to be so desirable that Conor intends to marry her, but she meets Naoise, a son of the House of Usna, and runs away with him and his two brothers, Ardan and Ainnle. After a few years, Conor sends Fergus to convince the lovers that all is forgiven. They accept Conor’s offer to return to Ireland, whereupon the still lovesick king uses stealth and guile to kill Naoise and his brothers once they arrive at his palace. Three variant endings exist: Deirdre immediately kills herself, she quickly dies of sorrow, or Conor keeps her for a year, after which she commits suicide.

Three great Irish plays before MacDonagh’s were based on the Deirdre legend, and each in its own way interprets Deirdre as a romantic symbol of female heroism and as a model of support, inspiration, and companionship for the Irish hero. In his Deirdre (1902), Æ depicts the heroine as the incarnation of the ancient Irish gods, who will one day return to validate the sacrifice of Deirdre and Naoise, made immortal by their escape into death. Images of sleep, dreams, and vision help establish a mystical context in which the world of myth and magic, not the everyday world, is the deepest reality and the most true. Yeats’s Deirdre (pr. 1906) is an exercise in concentrated poetic imagery that accentuates the passion of the lovers and invites them to live forever in the Byzantium of art. The greatest of these three plays is Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows (pr. 1910), written in simple, direct prose with a peasant dialect. Synge’s version establishes a sympathetic connection between the lovers and nature; the lovers triumph over age and the mutability of earthly love by choosing the timeless immortality of death.

Just as Shakespeare wrote his Troilus and Cressida with Geoffrey Chaucer and Homer in mind, so MacDonagh composed his play as both a contribution to and a comment on the great plays that preceded his. He deromanticizes the story by using the technique of inversion. Unlike Æ, MacDonagh refers to no gods who wait in the wings, and mysticism gives way to a hard-nosed, deeply flawed world. Unlike Yeats, MacDonagh refuses to glorify the passion of Deirdre and Naoise; in fact, he purposefully degrades it into a sexual obsession that Deirdre must overcome. Like Synge, MacDonagh fills his play with nature imagery, but the effect is very different. Images of nature, animals, and food in Lady Spider accentuate the bestial side of man and his subjugation to appetites of all kinds. The blank verse that contains these images is tough, lean, and elemental, stunningly beautiful in its starkness.

The central purpose of Lady Spider is to criticize earlier versions of the Deirdre legend and to recover the basic meaning of the myth, which proves to be startlingly modern. This purpose may be seen by examining closely the way in which MacDonagh changes a scene that first appears in Synge’s play. Synge invented the character of Owen, a grotesque peasant who values nothing but Deirdre’s love. MacDonagh replaces Owen with Art, a Scottish king who promises Deirdre “honey words” and “truth,” and who wishes to take her to the Palace of Art, the home of “sweet poetry,” where all the bards and harpers will sing of Deirdre. She is singularly unimpressed with Art and threatens to cut out his tongue, the traditional punishment for poets who lie.

Literally, this exchange emphasizes Deirdre’s desirability—wherever she goes, men lust after her. The scene also foreshadows the real reason that Conor wants her back in Ireland: Like King Art, King Conor is a lustful, unprincipled old man, as drawn to Deirdre as any young man. Symbolically, however, the ugly little Scottish king represents literary art, which has tried to appropriate Deirdre for its own purposes, oblivious to the beauty of the original myth. As MacDonagh sees it, Æ, Yeats, Synge, and many others are guilty of attempted rape, of forcing the legend into wholly alien significance. Soon after Deirdre first meets Art, he is killed while attempting to flee and lies sprawling in the middle of the stage at the end of act 2. This is poetic justice, so to speak, and the end, MacDonagh implies, of all of this romantic Deirdre nonsense in Irish art.

As this short explication illustrates, Lady Spider is richly artistic, despite its attitude toward art and poetry, and its characters are superbly realized. Naoise, Deirdre’s lover, is the playboy of the Western world, cynical about women and sex and unable to get enough of either, a sort of Hotspur without young Percy’s charm. Naoise is full of empty idealism and self-interest but unable to develop into anything better. His rival Conor is shrewder and more intelligent but has grown old without wisdom. A superb manipulator of men, he is in turn manipulated by his own glands, which make him as lecherous as a monkey. Buffeted between these two men, Deirdre is a quintessentially modern woman, blamed for being the source of all trouble yet in reality the victim of men’s appetites and of her own.

Deirdre’s development is the center of interest in the play. At first, MacDonagh’s Deirdre dreams romantically about men. It is love she wants, but in Naoise she gets animal lust that makes her his sexual thrall. Desperate, she puts Naoise under geasa—magical bonds that are supposed to force consent—in an attempt to make Naoise marry her. After the couple flees to Scotland, Deirdre hardens with time, still sexually captivated by her lover but increasingly aware of his faults, especially his promiscuity. Lured back to Ireland, Deirdre has outgrown Naoise, both mentally and physically, and she has frank admiration for the way in which Conor outwits and outmanipulates her and Naoise, causing the death of the latter. Seeing that manipulation is the necessary means to any end in this brutal, political world, Deirdre resolves to become Conor’s wife, not out of love or even pity but to torment him with his sexual inadequacy, thereby becoming his master, driving him to despair, and securing his crown for her son, who is safe in Scotland. Deirdre’s final goal will elude her, for the audience knows in advance that she will be the one to commit suicide.

The world of Lady Spider turns on negatives, on false hopes and Pyrrhic victories. MacDonagh has revealed the modern world in an ancient mirror, and it is a world in which all value has drained away, a world in which love is reduced to sex, in which supernature is replaced by nature, in which wisdom gives way to craft and guile, and in which human virtues are supplanted by animal appetites. This kind of world cannot support real tragedy, and so Deirdre remains alive at the play’s end—doomed but denied the dignity of death. Paradoxically, however, the play itself is captivating, possessed of a hard, gemlike brilliance that simply overpowers the audience with the force of MacDonagh’s vision. For all of these reasons, Lady Spider is the best of the Deirdre plays. However, it may not be MacDonagh’s best play.

God’s Gentry

Surprisingly, God’s Gentry remained unpublished despite the fact that Robert Hogan, one of the few scholars to have seen it acted, calls God’s Gentry “a much more colorful and theatrical show than Happy as Larry.” The exact opposite of Lady Spider, God’s Gentry pushes romance and fantasy to their limits in a story about a band of tinkers who invoke the help of an Irish god to turn County Mayo upside down. Tinkers and gentry trade places for a year until the god’s power wears off. According to Hogan, God’s Gentry is a perfectly delightful play, full of “dancing, singing, spectacle, and high spirits.” It remains for some enterprising scholar to edit and publish this play—and other inaccessible or unpublished plays by MacDonagh—so that this neglected modern playwright can begin to receive the critical attention and the wide audience that he deserves.

Bibliography

Browne, E. Martin, ed. Introduction to Four Modern Verse Plays. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1957. One of the plays selected is MacDonagh’s Happy as Larry. Browne discusses the play’s particular sense of poetic drama in terms that provide a useful approach not only to the work in question but also to MacDonagh’s distinctive language and dramaturgy. The discussion also draws attention to differences between MacDonagh and other modern writers of verse plays.

Hogan, Robert. After the Irish Renaissance: A Critical History of the Irish Drama Since “The Plough and the Stars.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967. MacDonagh’s background and career are described in the context of experimentation in verse drama by the generation of Irish playwrights who immediately succeeded William Butler Yeats. All MacDonagh’s important plays are examined, and their distinctive poetic origins and attainments are assessed. Contains bibliographical information concerning the plays.

MacDonagh, Donagh. “The Death-watch Beetle.” Drama, no. 12 (February, 1949): 4-7. MacDonagh provides a succinct account of the rise, and what he considers the imminent fall, of the Abbey Theatre. His views are revealing in the light of his own status as a playwright, the orientation and tone of his plays, and the production of his works by companies other than the Abbey.

MacDonagh, Thomas. Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish. Rev. ed. Tyone, Ireland: Relay Books, 1996. This volume by Donagh MacDonagh’s father sheds light on MacDonagh’s heritage and work.

Norstedt, Johann A. Thomas MacDonagh: A Critical Biography. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. A biography of Donagh MacDonagh’s poet-patriot father, which is essential reading for a sense of MacDonagh’s background and his work’s relationship to his illustrious heritage. Includes limited information relevant to an evaluation of MacDonagh’s work for the theater. Also contains a full bibliography.

Wickstrom, Gordon M. “Introduction to Lady Spider.” Journal of Irish Literature 9, no. 3 (1980): 4-82. A first publication of MacDonagh’s least-known work, based on the well-known Irish legend of Deirdre. The work’s place in the canon of plays dealing with the Deirdre legend is evaluated, thereby providing a brief, instructive introduction to MacDonagh’s dramatic imagination. The text comes complete with editorial annotations.