Critiquing Cultures of Agonism: Games in Lady Gregory’s Plays and Translations

Abstract

When, in 1902, Lady Gregory published her first play, she was already widely perceived to be an old woman. In the course of that year, Gregory turned fifty; her husband had died more than a decade earlier, and she had subsequently cultivated an image of chaste widow in perpetual mourning. To most observers, her physical appearance suggested fidelity to a bygone era and a stubborn adherence to defunct traditions. When Gregory traveled to America in 1911, the newspapers frequently commented on her age; the New York Daily Tribune, for instance, asserted that “to hear her tell of the Irish players . . . is like reading from old books about the theatre.” Gregory, however, maintained that being an “old woman” was precisely what made her comic vision possible. As she explained to a reporter in Boston, “All the young writers are so busy writing tragedy that I shall have to go on [writing comedies], as I am the only one old enough to laugh.” Gregory’s comment deserves reflection. Only five years after she made her remark about being old enough to laugh, the history of Irish nationalism would arrive at a decisive turning point in the Easter Rising. As Gregory recognized, her allegiance to the comic muse positioned her at the margins of this historical development: only by being at a remove from the fray of combat could she manage to laugh. Gregory underlines her outsider status by linking her choice of genre not to her class, but to her age and, implicitly, to her gender, as in the first decades of the twentieth century, the dominant strain of Irish nationalist drama was decidedly masculinist. As Spivak points out, “old women” are