IN the summer of 1909 I went one day from London to Ayot St. Lawrence, a Hertfordshire village, to consult Mr. Bernard Shaw on some matters connected with our Theatre. When I was leaving, he gave me a little book, The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet, which had just been printed, although not published. It had, however, been already rejected by the Censor, as all readers of the newspapers know; and from that quiet cottage the fiery challenge-giving answers had been sent out. I read the play as I went back in the train, and when at St. Pancras Mr. Yeats met me to talk over the business that had taken me away, I showed him the little book that had been given its black ball, and I said, "Hypocrites."
A little time afterwards Mr. Shaw offered us the play for the Abbey, for the Censor has no jurisdiction in Ireland–an accidental freedom. We [Page 141] accepted it and put it in rehearsal that we might produce it in Horse Show week. We were without a regular stage manager at that time, and thought to have it produced by one of the members of the Company. But very soon the player who had taken it in charge found the work too heavy and troublesome, and withdrew from the stage management, though not from taking a part. I had a letter one morning telling me this, and I left by the next train for Dublin. As I left, I sent a wire to a London actor–a friend–asking if he could come over and help us out of this knot. Meanwhile, that evening, and before his answer came, I held a rehearsal, the first I had ever taken quite alone. I thought out positions during the night, and next morning, when I had another rehearsal, I began to find an extraordinary interest and excitement in the work. I saw that Blanco's sermon, coming as it did after bustling action, was in danger of seeming monotonous. I broke it up by making him deliver the first part standing up on the Sheriff's bench, then bringing him down to sit on the table and speak some of the words into the face of Elder Posnet. After that I sent him with a leap on to the table for the last [Page 142] phrases. I was very much pleased with the effect of this action, and by the time a telegram told me my London friend could come, I was confident enough to do without him. We were very proud and pleased when the whole production was taken to London later by the Stage Society. I have produced plays since then, my own and a few others. It is tiring work; one spends so much of one's own vitality.
That is what took me away from home to Dublin in that summer time, when cities are out of season. Mr. Yeats had stayed on at Coole at his work, and my letters to him, and letters after that to my son and to Mr. Shaw, will tell what happened through those hot days, and of the battle with Dublin Castle, which had taken upon itself to make the writ of the London Censor run at the Abbey.
I received while in Dublin, the following letter from a permanent official in Dublin Castle:
"DEAR LADY GREGORY:
"I am directed by the Lord Lieutenant to state that His Excellency's attention has been called to an announcement in the Public Press that a play [Page 143] entitled The Shewing up of Blanco Posnet is about to be performed in the Abbey Theatre.
"This play was written for production in a London theatre, and its performance was disallowed by the Authority which in England is charged with the Censorship of stage plays. The play does not deal with an Irish subject, and it is not an Irish play in any other sense than that its author was born in Ireland. It is now proposed to produce this play in the Abbey Theatre, which was founded for the express purpose of encouraging dramatic art in Ireland, and of fostering a dramatic school growing out of the life of the country.
"The play in question does not seem well adapted to promote these laudable objects or to belong to the class of plays originally intended to be performed in the Abbey Theatre, as described in the evidence on the hearing of the application for the Patent.
"However this may be, the fact of the proposed performance having been brought to the notice of the Lord Lieutenant, His Excellency cannot evade the responsibility cast upon him of considering whether the play conforms in other respects to the conditions of the Patent. [Page 144]
"His Excellency, after the most careful consideration, has arrived at the conclusion that in its original form the play is not in accordance either with the assurances given by those interested when the Patent was applied for, or with the conditions and restrictions contained in the Patent as granted by the Crown.
"As you are the holder of the Patent in trust for the generous founder of the Theatre, His Excellency feels bound to call your attention, and also the attention of those with whom you are associated, to the terms of the Patent and to the serious consequences which the production of the play in its original form might entail. . ."
I tell what followed in letters written to Coole:
"Thursday, August 12th. At the Theatre this morning the Secretary told me Whitney & Moore (our solicitors) had telephoned that they had a hint there would be interference with the production of Blanco Posnet by the Castle, and would like to see me.
"I went to see Dr. Moore. He said a Castle Official, whose name he would not give, had called the day before yesterday and said, 'As a friend of Sir Benjamin Whitney, I have come to tell you [Page 145] that if this play is produced it will be a very expensive thing for Miss Horniman.' Dr. Moore took this to mean the Patent would be forfeited. I talked the matter over with him and asked if he would get further information from his friend as to what method they meant to adopt, for I would not risk the immediate forfeiture of the Patent, but would not mind a threat of refusal to give a new Patent, as by that time–1910–perhaps neither the present Lord Lieutenant nor the present Censor would be in office.
"Dr. Moore said he would go and see his friend, and at a quarter past two I had a message on the telephone from him that I had better see the Castle Official or that he wished to see me (I did n't hear very well) before 3 o'clock. I went to the Castle and saw the Official. He said, 'Well.' I said, 'Are you going to cut off our heads?' He said, 'This is a very serious business; I think you are very ill-advised to think of putting on this play. May I ask how it came about?' I said, 'Mr. Shaw offered it and we accepted it.' He said, 'You have put us in a most difficult and disagreeable position by putting on a play to which the English Censor objected.' I answered, 'We do [Page 146] not take his view of it, and we think it hypocrisy objecting to a fallen woman in homespun on the stage, when a fallen woman in satin has been the theme of such a great number of plays that have been passed.' He said, 'It is not that the Censor objected to; it is the use of certain expressions which may be considered blasphemous. Could not they be left out?' 'Then there would be no play. The subject of the play is a man, a horse-thief, shaking his fist at Heaven, and finding afterwards that Heaven is too strong for him. If there were no defiance, there could be no victory. It is the same theme that Milton has taken in Satan's defiance in Paradise Lost. I consider it a deeply religious play, and one that could hurt no man, woman, or child. If it had been written by some religious leader, or even by a dramatist considered "safe," nonconformists would admire and approve of it.' He said, 'We have nothing to do with that, the fact for us is that the Censor has banned it.' I said, 'Yes, and passed The Merry Widow, which is to be performed here the same week, and which I have heard is objectionable, and The Devil, which I saw in London.' He said, 'We would not have inter- [Page 1407] fered, but what can we do when we see such paragraphs as these?' handing me a cutting from the Irish Times headed, 'Have we a Censor?' I replied, 'We have not written or authorised it, as you might see by its being incorrect. I am sole Patentee of the: Theatre.' He said, 'Dublin society will call out against us if we let it go on.' 'Lord Iveagh has taken six places.' 'For that play?' 'Yes, for that play, and I believe Dublin society is likely to follow Lord Iveagh.' He went on, 'And Archbishop Walsh may object.' I was silent. He said, 'It is very hard on the Lord Lieutenant. You should have had more consideration for him.' I replied, 'We did not know or remember that the power rested with him, but it is hard on him, for he can't please everybody.' He said, 'Will you not give it up?' 'What will you do if we go on?' 'Either take no notice or take the Patent from you at once.' I said, 'If you decide to forfeit our Patent, we will not give a public performance; but if we give no performance to be judged by, we shall rest under the slur of having tried to produce something bad and injurious.' 'We must not provoke Public opinion.' 'We provoked Nationalist public opinion in The [Page 148] Playboy, and you did not interfere.' 'Aye,' said he, 'exactly so, that was quite different; that had not been banned by the Censor.' I said, 'Time has justified us, for we have since produced The Playboy in Dublin and on tour with success, and it will justify us in the case of this play.' 'But Blanco Posnet is very inferior to The Playboy.' I said, 'Even so, Bernard Shaw has an intellectual position above that of Mr. Synge, though he is not above him in imaginative power. He is recognised as an intellectual force, and his work cannot be despised.' 'Lord Aberdeen will have to decide.' 'I should like him to know,' I said, 'that from a business point of view the refusal to allow this play, already announced, to be given would do us a serious injury.' He said, 'No advertisements have been published.' 'Yes,' I said, 'the posters have been out some days, and there is a good deal of booking already from England as well as here. We are just beginning to pay our way as a Theatre. We should be able to do so if we got about a dozen more stalls regularly. The people who would take stalls will be frightened off by your action. The continuance of our Theatre at all may depend on what you do now. We are [Page 149] giving a great deal of employment, spending in Dublin over £1500 a year, and our Company bears the highest possible character.' He said, 'I know that well.' I said, 'I know Lord Aberdeen is friendly to our Theatre, though he does not come to it, not liking the colour of our carpets.' He said 'He is a supporter of the drama. He was one of Sir Henry Irving's pall-bearers.' 'When shall we know the decision?' 'In a day or two, perhaps to-morrow. You can produce it in Cork, Galway, or Waterford. It is only in Dublin the Lord Lieutenant has power.' He read from time to time a few lines from the Patent or Act of Parliament before him, 'just to get them into your head.' The last words he read were, 'There must be no profane representation of sacred personages'; 'and that,' he said, 'applies to Blanco Posnet's representations of the Deity.' I told him of the Censor's note on The Playboy, 'The expression "Khaki cut-throats" must be cut out, together with any others that may be considered derogatory to His Majesty's Forces,' and he laughed. Then I said, 'How can we think much of the opinion of a man like that?' He said, 'I believe he was a bank manager.' We then said good-bye." [Page 150]
Friday, 5 o'c. Dr. Moore sent for me at 4 o'clock. I went with W. B. Yeats, who had arrived. The Crown Solicitor at the Castle, Sir B. Whitney's 'friend,' had called and told him the Lord Lieutenant was 'entirely opposed to the play being proceeded with and would use every power the law gave him to stop it,' and that, 'it would be much better for us to lay the play aside.'
"We decided to go on with the performance and let the Patent be forfeited, and if we must die, die gloriously. Yeats was for this course, and I agreed. Then I thought it right to let the Permanent Official know my change of intention, and, after some unsuccessful attempts on the telephone, W. B. Y. and I went to see him at the Castle. He was very smiling and amiable this time, and implored us, as we had understood him to do through the telephone, to save the Lord Lieutenant from his delicate position. 'You defy us, you advertise it under our very nose, at the time everyone is making a fight with the Censor.' He threatened to take away our Patent before the play came on at all, if we persisted in the intention. I said that would give us a fine case. Yeats said we intended to do Oedipus, that this also was a [Page 151] censored play, although so unobjectionable to religious minds that it had been performed in the Catholic University of Notre Dame, and that we should be prevented if we announced it now. He replied, 'leave that till the time comes, and you need n't draw our attention to it.' We said the Irish Times might again draw his attention to it. He proposed our having a private performance only. I said, 'I had a letter from Mr. Shaw objecting to that course.' He moaned, and said, 'It is very hard upon us. Can you suggest no way out of it?' We answered, 'None, except our being left alone.' 'Oh, Lady Gregory,' he said, appeal to your own common sense.' When I mentioned Shaw's letter, he said, 'All Shaw wants is to use the Lord Lieutenant as a whip to lay upon the Censor.' Yeats said, 'Shaw would use him in that way whatever happens.' 'I know he will,' said the Official. At last he asked if we could get Mr. Shaw to take out the passages he had already offered to take out for the Censor. We agreed to ask him to do this, as we felt the Castle was beaten, as the play even then would still be the one forbidden in England."
This is the letter I had received from Mr. Shaw: [Page 152]
"10 Adelphi Terrace, W. C. 12th August, 1909. Your news is almost too good to be true. If the Lord Lieutenant would only forbid an Irish play without reading it, and after it had been declared entirely guiltless and admirable by the leading high class journal on the side of his own party [The Nation ], forbid it at the command of an official of the King's household in London, then the green flag would indeed wave over Abbey Street, and we should have questions in Parliament and all manner of reverberating advertisement and nationalist sympathy for the Theatre."I gather from your second telegram that the play has, perhaps, been submitted for approval. If so, that will be the worse for us, as the Castle can then say they forbade it on its demerits without the slightest reference to the Lord Chamberlain.
"In any case, do not threaten them with a contraband performance. Threaten that we shall be suppressed; that we shall be made martyrs of; that we shall suffer as much and as publicly as possible. Tell them that they can depend on me to burn with a brighter blaze and louder yells than all Foxe's martyrs." [Page 153]
Mr. Shaw telegraphed his answer to the demand for cuts:
"The Nation article gives particulars of cuts demanded, which I refused as they would have destroyed the religious significance of the play. The line about moral relations is dispensable as they are mentioned in several other places; so it can be cut if the Castle is silly enough to object to such relations being called immoral, but I will cut nothing else. It is an insult to the Lord Lieutenant to ignore him and refer me to the requirements of a subordinate English Official. I will be no party to any such indelicacy. Please say I said so, if necessary."
I give in the Appendix the Nation article to which he refers. My next letter home says: "August 14. Having received the telegram from Shaw and the Nation article, we went to the Castle to see the Official, but only found his secretary, who offered to speak to him through a telephone, but the telephone was wheezy, and [Page 154] after long trying, all we could arrive at was that he wanted to know if we had seen Sir H. Beerbohm Tree's evidence, in which he said there were passages in Blanco that would be better out. Then he proposed our going to see him at his house, as he has gout and rheumatism and could n't come to us.
"We drove to his house. He began on Tree, but Yeats told him Tree was the chief representative of the commercial theatre we are opposed to. He then proposed our giving a private performance, and we again told him Shaw had forbidden that. I read him the telegram refusing cuts, but he seemed to have forgotten that he had asked for cuts, and repeated his appeal to spare the Lord Lieutenant. I showed him the Nation article, and he read it and said 'But the Book of Job is not by the same author as Blanco Posnet.' Yeats said, 'Then if you could, you would censor the Deity?' 'Just so,' said he. He asked if we could make no concession. We said, 'no,' but that if they decided to take away the Patent, we should put off the production till the beginning of our season, end of September, and produce it with Oedipus; then they would have to suppress both [Page 155] together. He brightened up and said, if we could put it off, things would be much easier, as the Commission would not be sitting then or the Public be so much interested in the question. I said 'Of course we should have to announce at once that it was in consequence of the threatened action of the Castle we had postponed it.' 'Oh, you really don't mean that! You would let all the bulls loose. It would be much better not to say anything at all, or to say the rehearsals took longer than you expected.' 'The public announcement will be more to our own advantage.' 'Oh, that is dreadful !' I said, 'We did not give in one quarter of an inch to Nationalist Ireland at The Playboy time, and we certainly cannot give in one quarter of an inch to the Castle.'
"'We must think of Archbishop Walsh!' I said, 'The Archbishop would be slow to move, for if he orders his flock to keep away from our play, he can't let them attend many of the Censor's plays, and the same thing applies to the Lord Lieutenant.' The Official said, 'I know that.' We said 'We did not give in to the Church when Cardinal Logue denounced the Countess Cathleen. We played it under police protection.' 'I never [Page 156] heard of that. Why did he object?' Yeats said, 'For exactly the same objection as is made to the present one, speeches made by demons in the play.'
"Yeats spoke very seriously then about the principle involved; pointing out that we were trying to create a model on which a great national theatre may be founded in the future, that if we accepted the English Censor's ruling in Ireland, he might forbid a play like Wills' Robert Emmet, which Irving was about to act, and was made to give up for political reasons. He said, 'You want, in fact, to have liberty to produce all plays refused by the Censor.' I said, 'We have produced none in the past and not only that, we have refused plays that we thought would hurt Catholic religious feeling. We refused, for instance, to produce Synge's Tinker's Wedding, much as we uphold his work, because a drunken priest made ridiculous appears in it. That very play was directly after Synge's death asked for by Tree, whom you have been holding up to us, for production in London.' He said, 'I am very sorry attention was drawn to the play. If no attention had been drawn to it by the papers, we should [Page 157] be all right. It is so wrong to produce it while the Commission is actually sitting and the whole question sub judice. We are in close official relation with the English officials of whom the Lord Chamberlain is one; that is the whole question.' We said, 'We see no way out of it. We are determined to produce the play. We cannot accept the Censor's decision as applying to Ireland and you must make up your mind what course to take, but we ask to be let known as soon as possible because if we are to be suppressed, we must find places for our players, who will be thrown out of work.' He threw up his hands and exclaimed, 'Oh, my dear lady, but do not speak of such a thing as possible!' 'Why,' I asked, 'what else have you been threatening all the time?' He said, 'Well, the Lord Lieutenant will be here on Tuesday and will decide. He has not given his attention to the matter up to this' (this does not bear out the Crown Solicitor's story); 'Perhaps you had better stay to see him.' I told him that I wanted to get home, but would stay if absolutely necessary. He said, 'Oh, yes, stay and you will probably see Lady Aberdeen also.'"
Mr. Shaw's next letter was from Kerry where he [Page 157] was motoring. In it he said: "I saw an Irish Times to-day with Blanco announced for production; so I presume the Castle has not put its foot down. The officials made an appalling technical blunder in acting as agents of the Lord Chamberlain in Ireland; and I worded my telegram in such a way as to make it clear that I knew the value of that indiscretion.
"I daresay the telegram reached the Castle before it reached you."
Meanwhile on August 15th I had written to the Castle:
"I am obliged to go home to-morrow, so if you have any news for us, will you very kindly let us have it at Coole.
"We are, as you know, arranging to produce Blanco on Wednesday, 25th, as advertised and booked for, unless you serve us with a 'Threatening notice,' in which case we shall probably postpone it till September 30th and produce it with the already promised Oedipus.
"I am very sorry to have given you so much trouble and worry, and, as we told you, we had no idea the responsibility would fall on any shoulders but our own; but I think we have fully explained [Page 159] to you the reasons that make it necessary for us now to carry the matter through."
I received the following answer:
"I am sorry you have been obliged to return to Galway. His Excellency, who arrived this morning, regrets that he has missed the opportunity of seeing you and desires me to say that if you wished an interview with him on Thursday, he would be glad to receive you at the Viceregal Lodge.
"He will give the subject which has been discussed between us his earliest attention."
I received by the same post a long and very kind letter from the Lord Lieutenant, written with his own hand. I am sorry that it was marked "Private," and so I cannot give it here. I may, however, quote the words that brought us back to Dublin. "It would seem that some further personal conference might be very desirable and therefore I hope that it may be possible for you to revisit Dublin on the earliest available day. I shall, of course, be most happy to have an opportunity for a talk with Mr. Yeats."
So my next letter home says: "Friday, 20th. We arrived at the Broadstone yesterday at 2.15, and were met by the Official's secretary, who asked [Page 160] us to go to the Viceregal Lodge. Arrived there, another secretary came and asked me to go and see the Lord Lieutenant alone, saying Mr. Yeats could go in later."
Alas! I must be discreet and that conversation with the King's representative must not be given to the world, at least by me. I can only mention external things: Mr. Yeats, until he joined the conference, being kept by the secretary, whether from poetical or political reasons, to the noncommittal subject of Spring flowers; my grieved but necessary contumacy; our joint and immovable contumacy; the courtesy shown to us and, I think, also by us; the kindly offers of a cup of tea; the consuming desire for that tea after the dust of the railway journey all across Ireland; our heroic refusal, lest its acceptance should in any way, even if it did not weaken our resolve, compromise our principles. . . . His Excellency's gracious nature has kept no malice and he has since then publicly taken occasion to show friendship for our Theatre. I felt it was a business forced upon him, who had used his high office above all for reconcilement, as it was upon me, who had lived under a peaceful star for some half a hundred years. I [Page 161] think it was a relief to both of us when at last he asked us to go on to the Castle and see again "a very experienced Official."
I may now quote again from my letters: "We found the Official rather in a temper. He had been trying to hear Lord Aberdeen's account of the interview through the telephone and could not. We gave our account, he rather threatening in tone, repeating a good deal of what he had said before. He said we should be as much attacked as they, whatever happened, and that men connected with two newspapers had told him they were only waiting for an opportunity of attacking not only the Lord Lieutenant but the Abbey, if the play is allowed; so we should also catch it. I said, 'Après vous.' He said Mr. Yeats had stated in the Patent Inquiry, the Abbey was for the production of romantic work. I quoted Parnell, 'Who shall set bounds to the march of a Nation?' We told him our Secretary had reported, 'Very heavy booking, first class people, a great many from the Castle.'
"He said he would see the Lord Lieutenant on his way home. We went to Dame Street Post Office and wired to Mr. Shaw: 'Have seen Viceroy. [Page 162] Deleted immoral relations, refused other cuts. He is writing to King, who supports Censor.'"
Then, as holder of the Patent, I took counsel's opinion on certain legal points, of which the most vital was this:
"Should counsel be of opinion that the Crown will serve notice requiring the play to be discontinued, then counsel will please say what penalty he thinks querist would expose herself to by disregarding the notice of the Crown and continuing the representation?"
The answer to this question was:
"If the theatre ceases to be licensed, as pointed out above, and any performance for gain takes place there, the penalty under the 26. Geo. III. cap 57, sec. (2) is £300 for each offence, to be recovered in a 'qui tam ' action; one half of the £300 going to the Rotunda Hospital, the other half to the informer who sues."
Mr. Yeats and I were just going to a rehearsal at the Abbey on the evening of August 21st when we received a letter from the Castle, telling us that a formal legal document, forbidding the performance of the play, would reach us immediately. The matter had now become a very [Page 163] grave one. We knew that we should, if we went on and this threat were carried out, lose not only the Patent but that the few hundred pounds that we had been able to save and with which we could have supported our players till they found other work, would be forfeited. This thought of the players made us waver, and very sadly we agreed that we must give up the fight. We did not say a word of this at the Abbey but went on rehearsing as usual. When we had left the Theatre and were walking through the lamp-lighted streets, we found that during those two or three hours our minds had come to the same decision, that we had given our word, that at all risks we must keep it or it would never be trusted again; that we must in no case go back, but must go on at any cost.
We wrote a statement in which we told of the pressure put upon us and the objections made, but of these last we said: "there is nothing to change our conviction that so far from containing offence for any sincere and honest mind, Mr. Shaw's play is a high and weighty argument upon the working of the Spirit of God in man's heart, or to show that it is not a befitting thing for us to set upon our stage the work of an Irishman, who [Page 164] is also the most famous of living dramatists, after that work has been silenced in London by what we believe an unjust decision.
"One thing" we continued, "is plain enough, an issue that swallows up all else and makes the merit of Mr. Shaw's play a secondary thing. If our Patent is in danger, it is because the decisions of the English Censor are being brought into Ireland, and because the Lord Lieutenant is about to revive, on what we consider a frivolous pretext, a right not exercised for a hundred and fifty years to forbid, at the Lord Chamberlain's pleasure, any play produced in any Dublin theatre, all these theatres holding their Patents from him.
"We are not concerned with the question of the English Censorship now being fought out in London, but we are very certain that the conditions of the two countries are different, and that we must not, by accepting the English Censor's ruling, give away anything of the liberty of the Irish Theatre of the future. Neither can we accept without protest the revival of the Lord Lieutenant's claim at the bidding of the Censor or otherwise. The Lord Lieutenant is definitely a political personage, holding office from the party in power, and what [Page 165] would sooner or later grow into a political Censorship cannot be lightly accepted."
Having sent this out for publication, we went on with our rehearsals.
In rehearsal I came to think that there was a passage that would really seem irreverent and give offence to the genuinely religious minds we respect. It was where Blanco said: "Yah! What about the croup? I guess He made the croup when He was thinking of one thing; and then He made the child when He was thinking of something else; and the croup got past Him and killed the child. Some of us will have to find out how to kill the croup, I guess. I think I 'll turn doctor just on the chance of getting back on Him by doing something He could n't do."
I wrote to Mr. Shaw about this, and he answered in this very interesting letter:
"Parknasilla, 19 August, 1909.
"I have just arrived and found all your letters waiting for me. I am naturally much entertained by your encounters and Yeats' with the Castle. I leave that building cheerfully in your hands.
"But observe the final irony of the situation. The English Censorship being too stupid to see the [Page 166] real blasphemy, makes a fool of itself. But you, being clever enough to put your finger on it at once, immediately proceed to delete what Redford's blunders spared.
"To me, of course, the whole purpose of the play lies in the problem, 'What about the croup?" When Lady –, in her most superior manner, told me, 'He is the God of Love,' I said, 'He is also the God of Cancer and Epilepsy.' That does not present any difficulty to me. All this problem of the origin of evil, the mystery of pain, and so forth, does not puzzle me. My doctrine is that God proceeds by the method of 'Trial and error,' just like a workman perfecting an aeroplane; he has to make hands for himself and brains for himself in order that his will may be done. He has tried lots of machines–the diphtheria bacillus the tiger, the cockroach; and he cannot extirpate them, except by making something that can shoot them, or walk on them, or, cleverer still, devise vaccines and antitoxins to prey on them. To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realisation of God, to regard his hands as God's hands, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as [Page 167] God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ. You will find it all in Man and Super Man, as you will find it all behind Blanco Posnet. Take it out of my play, and the play becomes nothing but the old cry of despair–Shakespeare's, 'As flies to wanton boys, so we are to the Gods; they kill us for their sport'–the most frightful blasphemy ever uttered." Mr. Shaw enclosed with this the passage rewritten, as it now appears in the published play.
We put on Blanco on the date announced, the 25th of August. We were anxious to the last, for counsel were of the opinion that if we were stopped, it would be on the Clause in the Patent against "Any representation which should be deemed or construed immoral, " and that if Archbishop Walsh or Archbishop Peacocke or especially the Head of the Lord Lieutenant's own Church, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Assembly, should say anything which might be "deemed and construed" to condemn the play, the threats made would be carried out. There were fears of a riot also, for newspapers and their posters had kept up [Page 168] the excitement, and there was an immense audience. It is a pity we had not thought in time of putting up our prices. Guineas were offered even for standing room in the wings.
The play began, and till near the end it was received in perfect silence. Perhaps the audience were waiting for the wicked bits to begin. Then, at the end, there was a tremendous burst of cheering, and we knew we had won. Some stranger outside asked what was going on in the Theatre. "They are defying the Lord Lieutenant" was the answer; and when the crowd heard the cheering, they took it up and it went far out through the streets.
There were no protests made on any side. And the play, though still forbidden in England, is still played by us, and always with success. And even if the protests hoped for had been made and we had suffered, does not Nietzsche say "A good battle justifies every cause"?
