Lady Gregory (1852–1932)

This is Lady Gregory's masterpiece. In order to appreciate it, one needs some context: in Irish mythology, Dierdre (the submissive, pure, suicidal woman) is revered and Grania (the rebellious, sensual, life-claiming woman) is denigrated. Lady Gregory turns this on its head and celebrates Grania's fierce rage when the two men she loves prove to care more about each other than about her. The poetry of this play brings tears of reverence to my eyes. I always wanted to direct it onstage but show more never got around to it because I didn't have students who could do justice to the music of the Irish-English text. show less

Good stuff. Not your straightforward, easily untangleable mythology like the Greeks with a pantheon of gods gathering in the one place. Lady Gregory's compilation is a head-stealing romp of fights and cows and great feats and an eye-gouging array of letters making up each name that graces the page.

This is Lady Gregory's retelling of, for the most part, the /Tain bo Cuailgne/ itself, rewritten in a more chronological order than the Tain proper with its long flashback sequences. It also includes some of the supplementary materials which follow the Tain, and are related in the Dover Books condensation (which I strongly suspect drew on this work).

In general, this is a very accessible and very interesting form of the Tain and the Ulster cycle; I recommend it strongly, although the show more Forgotten Books reprint apparently has some problems with its OCR.

And as for the Ulster Cycle itself, I know no words to do it justice... I can only say that if you don't know it, you owe it to yourself to learn, and this is a good starting point for that learning. show less

This volume of Lady Gregory’s Collected Plays contains all those that deal with the magic of Irish folk stories or the supernatural aspects of ghosts or religion. Those which use as their plot magic and kings' sons were written for an audience of children. In The Dragon the theatrical monster is to come and carry off the princess as all good dragons should and then be killed by a prince, but in this case the disguised prince does not kill the beast but does a transplant giving him a show more squirrel's heart which makes him chase off to the West Indies in search of cocoa-nuts. For her adult audiences, Lady Gregory wrote her Irish passion play, The Story Brought by Brigit, and Shanwalla, a play about the drugging of a prize racehorse just before a race. The innocence of the accused trainer is only proved after the appearance of the ghost of the trainer's murdered wife who sup­plies particularly relevant informa­tion which shakes the villain into a confession. The third act of this play was not as good as it might have been, and after Yeats had criticised it Lady Gregory rewrote the first part, published here for the first time. The original act, together with Yeats' criticisms, are included in an Appendix. The other plays in this volume are what Lady Gregory called her “first play”, Colman & Guaire; her beautiful miracle play set in the West of Ireland, The Travelling Man; The Full Moon; Aristotle's Bellows and Dave. Source: Amazon.com show less