In 1892, soon after Yeats met the actress and activist Maud Gonne, he decided to turn a fable he had written for Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry into a vehicle for Gonne’s theatrical abilities. Though Maud Gonne never performed the title role, the
play illustrates Yeats’ reactions towards Gonne’s nationalist activism and spirit in his rendition of the heroine. The Countess Cathleen takes place during some mythic time in which Ireland is suffering from
famine and disease caused by
demons who wish to blackmail the
peasants into selling their souls for food. The saintly Countess Cathleen O’Shea who is virtuous and so good she's only fit for heaven, takes pity on the peasants and offers up her soul in payment for their lives. The Countess dies in despair but before the demons succeed in taking her soul, Heaven grants her clemency because God only looks at the intentions of people, not the deeds, and the demons are vanquished without their prize.Yeats’ attraction towards Celtic mythology and mystical Irish pasts left him open to attack from another protest which rang loudly around the production of The Countess Cathleen. Members of the public felt that Yeats had ignored Irish history in order to make his pro-Ascendancy play. Though the play was ostensibly set in the sixteenth century, the climate of famine and disease surrounding the plot reminded the audience all too well of the most recent potato famine which had gripped the nation in 1845. The resentment surrounding the Land War of the 1890s occurred because of the common view that the Protestant
landlords did not save their starving
tenants from their own good will, but, rather, offered food on the condition that the Catholic tenants converted to Protestantism. When the peasants refused to do so, the landlords left them to die or emigrate in droves. The Countess’ self-sacrifice was so contrary to the majority of the Protestant landlords’ actions during the Famine, that many of the Catholic audience members found the play not only inaccurate, but a blatant piece of pro-landlord, anti-nationalist propaganda.
<1> James Flannery, W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 143.
<2> Yeats, W.B., The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats,(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935), p.50.
<3> However, some landlords, including the playwright Edward Martyn’s father, did try to stem the famine by feeding their tenants.
<4> Frazier, Adrian. “The ideology of the Abbey Theatre.” In “Twentieth Century Irish Drama” p. 38.
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