THE RISING OF THE MOON by Lady Augusta Gregory This a beautiful one-act little play, written in 1904 by Lady Augusta Gregory
(born Isabella Augusta Persee, in Roxborough, Ireland on March 15, 1852). She was one of the founders of the Irish Literary Renaissance, and, with William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, a founder of the Irish Literary Theatre (later the famed Abbey Theatre) in Dublin. Her playwrighting began with helping Yeats with his plays, and later she began writing one-act plays herself as comic relief for the more serious-minded poetic dramas. Her plays were very popular with Dublin audiences, and helped to keep the Theatre alive financially. Her characters are not at all romanticized, but are very realistic--one of her great talents was being able to catch the vocabulary, speech mannerisms and rhythms of the Irish people, which she studied as she traveled throughout Ireland, seeking its rich oral tradition.
In THE RISING OF THE MOON, one sees the deep conflict between the hearts of the Irish people, even those hired as policemen (who also longed secretly, in their heart of hearts, for freedom, as often as not), and their duty to maintain the status quo, with all the English gold and power and "good common sense" behind it. In this story, it is the songs of and Irish bard which catch the Sergeant''s heart, in spite of himself, as he keeps watch to capture an escaped political prisoner--as music has always caught the human heart, and nowhere more than among the Irish. The outcome is totally unpredictable, and yet the consequence was, eventually, the successful fight for freedom, and the Irish Republic.