Ann Saddlemyer Research Articles

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Editorial Introduction: Our 35th Year

It’s spring, a time of renewal and festivity! This special “bonus” issue of Theatre Research in Canada celebrates the journal’s 35 th issue and the beginning of its 35 th year (we officially turn 35 in 2015). For over three decades, TRIC has served as a site of scholarly debate, dialogue, and discovery for a vibrant community of theatre and performance scholars, both in Canada and increasingly beyond its borders. TRIC’s first issue, published in the spring of 1980, featured an eclectic range of articles on such topics as Dora Mavor Moore, the first circus in eastern Canada, Montreal’s Theatre Royal in 1825, the nineteenth-century theatre manager Eugene A. McDowell, and Rick Salutin’s Les Canadiens. In their inaugural editorial, co-founding editors Richard Plant and Ann Saddlemyer expressed hope that the journal would advance research on “the theatrical and dramatic history of Canada” and “provide a forum for the exchange of thoughtful and studied opinion, thereby encouraging the formation of an informed critical perspective within which to view Canadian theatre.” In addition to publishing articles on a broad range of topics, they planned to include excerpts of scripts, book reviews and review articles, and a “Notes and Queries” section with “brief statements of important new projects and specific requests relating to individual research.” Plant and Saddlemyer anticipated that over time the journal would “achieve [. . .] a balanced presentation of contemporary work in the areas of criticism and research into theatre history in Canada.”

A Cautionary Tale of Performance Ethnography

A Cautionary Tale of Performance Ethnography Brian Rusted (bio) Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010 Click for larger view View full resolution Book cover of Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s Staging Strife: Lessons from Performing Ethnography with Polish Roma Women (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Cover design by David LeBlanc Over the last decade, books such as Denzin’s Performance Ethnography, Madison’s Critical Ethnography, collections charting the performance studies field (Davis; Madison and Hamera), and those demonstrating its contributions to community, voice, and change (Kuppers; Pollock Remembering) have done much to facilitate the travel of engaged performance scholarship across qualitatively informed disciplines. Such endeavours have helped make links connecting ethnography, performance, and critical praxis more evident, and have demonstrated what Dwight Conquergood characterized as the shift in ethnography from a textual enterprise of reading cultural performances to a sensory and dialogical one where performance is embodied as epistemology and representational practice (190). Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston’s Staging Strife builds on this legacy with a case study of the challenges and accomplishments of collaborative, [End Page 91] performance scholarship. The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry has recognized these accomplishments with its 2011 Qualitative Book Award, as did the Canadian Association of Theatre Research naming it as one of the recipients of the 2011 Ann Saddlemyer Award. Staging Strife is based on doctoral research conducted among Roma women in northern Poland starting in 2001. Kazubowski-Houston’s project was shaped by several objectives: she wanted to focus on ethnic and gendered violence experienced by Roma women in Poland; in addition to a dissertation, the research process was to produce a collaborative work of theatre derived, she hoped, “to break new ground” in ethnographic theatre “by employing physical movement as well as text as a mode of expression” (14); and given the engaged, critical perspective of performance ethnography, the project was “to effect change in the lives of Roma women” (Kazubowski-Houston 24). Kazubowski-Houston developed her sense of ethnographic theatre during her MFA. This approach, influenced by Johannes Fabian’s work in Zaire, allows the researcher to explore questions “by collaboratively developing a theatre performance with research participants” (Kazubowski-Houston 31). One of the project’s distinctive qualities, then, is that it encompasses the process of performance creation: the performance is not solely a representational work crafted after the fact from the research. Although Kazubowski-Houston identifies as an anthropologist, she brought extensive experience as a working theatre professional to the project. Her Polish background and longstanding interest in Poland’s modernist, theatrical avant-garde was complemented by her partner Shawn’s training in Grotowski’s acting methods at the University of Winnipeg. Together they formed Teatr Korzenie and derived their own brand of avant-garde practice, “Illustrative Performing Technique” (Kazubowski-Houston 34). Without such creative experience, it is unlikely that this project could have been proposed, completed, or turned into a theatre work or monograph. Staging Strife is accessible and engaging: it carries the reader effortlessly into the unfolding research process. This quality is due in part to a fluid movement between distinct verbal registers: a personal register that articulates both theoretical and experiential engagements shaping Kazubowski-Houston’s perspective; a more evocative, sensory register aimed at bringing the details of her subjects’ lives vividly before the reader; and a scripted, dramatic register representing particular moments of interaction that demonstrate central issues or turning points as the project unfolds. Kazubowski-Houston deploys these registers carefully making each methodological step clear to the reader while preserving the vitality of the temporal experience of doing the research. The writing enacts precepts of reflexive, interpretive autoethnographies that “reveal the presence of their authors, their personal and cultural background, their interactions with the research participants, and their thoughts and feelings during the research process” (Kazubowski-Houston 15). The book balances its major components through such reflexivity: Kazubowski-Houston’s roles as ex-patriot, doctoral researcher, and theatre professional; the Roma’s socially marginal experiences as they coped with day-to-day concerns about health, violence, income, and discrimination; and the art world politics of the local cultural centre and...

A Tiger in a Wire Cage: A Review of Ann Saddlemyer's W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters

A Tiger in a Wire Cage: A Review of Ann Saddlemyer's W. B. Yeats and George Yeats: The Letters

Synge Scholarship: Nothing to Do with Nationalism?

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) is the fulcrum upon which Irish drama and theatre studies is balanced. Synge's nodal position is predicated upon the dramatist's rock ‘n’ roll recalcitrance towards the dramaturgical praxis of his contemporaries; his subject matter was as shocking as the Anglo-Irish idiom in which it was articulated. After Synge's premature death in 1909, W. B. Yeats's fundamental concern was that Synge scholars would attempt ‘to mould . . . some simple image of the man’. However, W. J. McCormack's concentric biography of Synge, The Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge, and Ann Saddlemyer's The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge, have demonstrated that Synge's life was complex, multifaceted and in deep dialogue with Irish culture. But with respect to Synge's drama a simple image has surrounded critical discourse: the politics of Irish nationalism.

W. B. YEATS, 'The Tower' (1928): Manuscript Materials, edited by Richard J. Finneran with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer. * W. B. YEATS, Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: Manuscript Materials, edited by Jared Curtis.

W. B. YEATS, 'The Tower' (1928): Manuscript Materials, edited by Richard J. Finneran with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer. * W. B. YEATS, Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus: Manuscript Materials, edited by Jared Curtis.

Candida Rifkind. Conrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada

CANDIDA RIFKIND Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, & the Left in 1930s Canada Toronto, Buffalo, London; University of Toronto Press, 2009. viii + 268 pp. Recipient of the Ann Saddlemyer scholarly book award at the 2010 conference of the CATR/ACRT, Candida Rifkind's Comrades and Critics expands the vital field of scholarship that is rewriting our knowledge and our analyses of left-wing Canadian modernism. In the 1930s, Canadian women writers and cultural workers including Dorothy Livesay, Ruby Ronan, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, Toby Gordon Ryan, Mildred Goldberg, Elsie Park Gowan, Minnie Evans Bicknell, Mary Reynolds, and Jim (Jean) Watts made crucial contributions to English-Canadian communist and social democratic journalism, poetry, fiction, and theatre. Rifkind surveys this work in historical context and addresses its place in national cultural memory and its reception in English-Canadian literary history. An introductory chapter on the Encounter points to the double duty of the English-Canadian literary left, to give creative expression to socialism and overturn the dominant literary (4), and goes on to frame the book's most original insights, which have to do with the gendered terms of the Socialist-Modernist encounter and its impact on the period's women artists and on their work. I would say, in my second-wave sort of way, that this book exposes the pervasive sexism of the most progressive discourses of English Canada in the 1930s. As Rifkind explains, the problem was not only that gender issues were explicitly subordinated to class and other struggles during the Comintern period, and then subordinated again in relation to the fight against fascism during the period of the Popular Front, although this did happen and it needs to be remembered. (My own view, and I know that I am not alone in this, is that one of the most important lessons of the twentieth-century revolutions is that we humans must not ever again leave our humanity behind in order to storm the barricades and expect to be able to pick it up again on the other side. But I digress.) The problem is more acute because the explicit sidelining of gender issues in the 1930s was exacerbated by the discursive and symbolic linkages between rugged masculinity, socialist progress, and modernist aesthetics, on one hand; and femininity, a decadent and despised bourgeoisie, and bad art, on the other: Women on the political left often had to subordinate questions of gender to those of class and ethnicity, and by the 1930s the gains made by pre-war socialist feminists and the suffrage movement of an earlier generation faltered (Newton 171). Across the Canadian left by the end of the 1920s, women's issues were being subordinated to class struggle and then, with the rise of European fascism in the early 1930s, fighting racisms and anti-Semitism at home and overseas. Women who were both socialists and modernists in 1930s Canada had to consequently find ways to accommodate themselves to the downplaying of women's issues in leftist politics and the contempt for any aesthetic perceived as feminine in modernist literature. Each of the women I foreground in this book struggled to do this in a different way; what unites them is an attempt to disassociate their female identities from the feminine metaphors and images typically used to criticize conservative artistic tradition as well as liberal bourgeois politics. (11) Add to this the fact that real economic and political power was concentrated in the hands of men, and the discouragements and detours performed by these women artists seem merely inevitable. …

“Of What is Past, or Passing, or To Come”: Recent Yeats Scholarship

“Of What is Past, or Passing, or To Come”: Recent Yeats Scholarship George Bornstein The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials. W. B. Yeats. Richard J. Finneran, ed., with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp. liii + 670. $99.95 (cloth). Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Helen Vendler. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xix + 428. $35.00 (cloth). Yeats’s Poetic Codes. Nicholas Grene. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 247. $99.00 (cloth). The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts. Ronald Schuchard. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xxvi + 447. $110.00 (cloth). Influence and Confluence. Yeats Annual No. 17: A Special Number. Warwick Gould, ed. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. $100.00 (cloth). Yeats famously looked both backward and forward from the present, as his celebrated phrase from “Sailing to Byzantium” suggests. It applies well to the five books under review here. These works by Helen Vendler, Nicholas Grene, Ronald Schuchard, Warwick Gould, and the late Richard J. Finneran stand in different ways as major accomplishments by respected senior scholars in the field of modernist scholarship in general and of Yeats studies in particular. We sometimes forget how recent Yeats studies are in the academy. Sixty years ago those pioneers of the first generation of Yeats scholars Richard Ellmann and Thomas [End Page 609] Parkinson had to legitimate in their graduate programs (at Yale and Berkeley, respectively) the acceptance of a doctoral dissertation on so recent a writer as Yeats. Yet in just over twenty years after their resultant breakthrough books, the critical-biographical Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) and more textually-based W. B. Yeats, Self-Critic: A Study of His Early Verse (1951), Yeats would already come under fire from poststructuralist and then cultural critics as politically and sexually retrograde. The books discussed here exemplify the impressive textual, critical, and historical scholarship of the generation that came after Ellmann and Parkinson, and therein lies both their glory and their limit. On the one hand, that they bring such historical, biographical, critical, and textual approaches to disparate culminations makes them worth the attention of any student of modernist poetry and, particularly with Finneran’s edition, opens new avenues for younger scholars and graduate students to explore. On the other hand, methodologically the works display an indifference to changes in literary study for the past three decades that leaves plenty of territory for future scholars to investigate. Richard Finneran’s prize-winning edition of W. B. Yeats’s The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials (brought to successful conclusion by Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer after Finneran’s untimely death) deserves applause both for its textual accomplishment and for its creation of avenues for future work. The final volume to be published in the poetry series of the Cornell Yeats project (there is a separate, ongoing one for the plays as well), its 670 pages display both photo-facsimiles and facing typographic transcription of all known surviving manuscript drafts of the poems in that major modernist volume, including such major and influential works as “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Tower,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Among School Children,” among others. Collecting them was difficult, especially in the pre-internet age of card catalogues, handwritten lists, and often expensive travel to collections. Most of them are now in the great Yeats collection of the National Library of Ireland, much of it formerly in Yeats’s son Michael’s private collection at Cliff House in Dalkey outside Dublin, where Finneran and I among others first consulted them. More documents come from repositories like the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the Bodleian at Oxford, the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory, and the Beinecke at Yale. Their publication here completes the goal of the Cornell Yeats poetry series to make all known surviving manuscripts of Yeats’s poetry available to libraries and scholars throughout the country and the world. That opens a range of possibilities for textual, critical, and historical investigation to researchers not only...

Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, and: Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre, and: Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre Shelley Scott (bio) Alan Filewod. Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre Textual Studies in Canada, University College of the Cariboo 2002. xviii, 120. $12.00 Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap, editor. Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre Talonbooks. 320. $24.95 The University College of the Cariboo publishes Textual Studies in Canada, and in the spring of 2002, with issue 15, began what was to have been a [End Page 345] series of monographs under the title 'Critical Performances in Canada.' The monograph series has since been discontinued, but the Canadian scholarly community has Alan Filewod's Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre to remind us of the initiative. In the acknowledgments, we learn that editors Jim Hoffman and Kate Sutherland commissioned Filewod's contribution, and in their introduction we learn that, by doing so, they 'hope[d] to add significantly to Canadian theory.' The editors cite Robert Wallace's Producing Marginality: Theatre and Criticism in Canada (1990) and Ric Knowles's more recent The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning (1999) as work that has been 'willing to systematically tackle ... wider areas and issues of performance in their Canadian constructions.' Thus we understand from the outset that Filewod's work will inhabit an interdisciplinary terrain that draws as easily from the discourses of performance and cultural studies as theatre history. Winner of the 2003 Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, Filewod's work maintains a careful balance between a 'big picture' thesis and close analysis of his case studies. He takes on the typical 'stages' in the 'meta-narrative' of Canadian theatre, from nineteenth-century closet drama to the alternative theatre movement to the controversy over Garth Drabinsky's Show Boat. But in each case he presents 'a counter-argument that relates historicized understandings of the theatre to the larger ideological narratives of Canadian nationhood.' Filewod's argument is that 'Canadian nationhood' and an 'imagined theatre' are regularly called upon to explain and describe each other, without any acknowledgment that 'theatre models social systems of production.' He writes: 'Theatre is not simply a matter of staged representation: it is an event both physical and symbolic; it transforms experience into a community narrative; and it materially constructs in the audience the community it addresses in its texts.' The result of Filewod's approach is a sort of radical textbook, an impression which is reinforced by the large format with double columns on each page, footnotes embedded in bold in the text, and copious illustrations on almost every page. But while this is an account of topics familiar to students of Canadian theatre history, it is a postcolonial, materialist, and highly theorized reworking that challenges the words 'Canadian,' 'theatre,' and 'history,' at every contested 'stage.' In her contribution to the anthology Performing National Identities, Erin Hurley takes up a related interrogation. Hurley criticizes the model of international play production that assigns theatre a representative function, as if Canadian plays are supposed to teach foreign audiences about Canada. It is a model nicely illustrated in the chapter by Jennifer Harvie, when she complains of British critics who discuss Judith Thompson's plays as realistic (and alarming) portraits of urban Canada. Hurley advocates instead that Canadian theatre be recast as a 'refracting mirror ... [that] [End Page 347] shows the world around itself, through itself.' Hurley's call for Canada to have a 'potentially deconstructive and performative role on the world stage' is answered by intriguing chapters about Canadian productions in Germany and Japan. Yoshinari Minami, for example, suggests that Japan looks to Canadian theatre in order to think about living in a multi-ethnic society, in turn confirming the editors' observation that 'Canadian plays outside Canada question the host country's assumptions about their own national identities as much as they question what it might mean to call a play Canadian.' Part 1 functions as an introduction to six Canadian playwrights by analysing specific aspects of their work. The collection is divided into three parts. Part...

Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats.

Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats.

New "Look," Emerging Vision: A Time For Introductions

From the Executive Editor: I am constantly at least a bit surprised by the path my life takes. Little did I know that slightly over twenty-six years after Ann Saddlemyer and I headed up the founding of this publication, and somewhat less time after I retired from its editing, I would be writing this short introduction in the capacity of Executive Editor of Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada. When we originally conceived of the journal, we thought of "theatre research" in terms of a very broad understanding of those two words. As scholars interested in theatre in its more than three dimensions, Ann and I were conscious of the theatre's visuality as well as its textuality, and its almost endless modes of performative expression. I remember our first issue tried to signal that with an article on circus, a tribute to Dora Mavor Moore, an essay on a historic theatre, another on nineteenthcentury theatre management, one on a "Canadian" company in the West Indies, and another on contrasting versions of a recent theatrical success. Reality was that we also lacked content in French despite the strong work of Louise Forsyth in our editorial team. But one of our wishes at the time was that we would leave enough room in the journal's mandate and design for it to change and grow, and for high quality research and reporting that were outside the traditional boundaries as well as work that was within. To a significant degree, that has occurred thanks to the efforts of the editorial teams after us. But this newly designed issue with its completely new team of editors seems to me to indicate an exceptional desire and opportunity to go further than before. We live in a climate that in many ways is remarkably open to and desirous of expression that is aptly different from what has preceded it. To say that we live in a different Canada now may be a cliché, but even in a cliché there is truth. Canada is now a country of many evident cultures and many forms of theatre and we need many forms of theatre research to represent it, its history and its place in an international world. There is much to be done and said in this new world, and so many areas to develop that have not been well developed to this point. The plans Bruce Barton briefy outlines in his short introduction, and that are obviously shared by Louise, Patrick, "the other" Bruce, Rebecca and Jennifer, are already becoming evident in the contents and design of this issue. They will be even more evident in the forthcoming issues, two of which are virtually ready for the printer, including one under the skilled guest editorship of Glen Nichols and the same Louise (Ladouceur).

Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School, 1991-2000

Introduction: Nicholas Grene, on the margins: Synge and Wicklow R.F.Foster, good behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish etiquette Frank McGuinness, John Millington Synge and the King of Norway Angela Bourke, Keening as theatre Tom Pualin, riders to the sea: a revisionist tragedy Antionette Quinn, staging the Irish peasant woman: Maud Gonne v. Synge Christopher Morash, all playboys now: the audience and the riot Martin Hilsky, re-imagining Synge's language: the Czech experience Declan Kiberd, the making and unmaking of myth: Synge as anthropologist Anthony Roche, Synge: the woman and the tramp Ann Saddlemyer, Synge's soundscape

Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 1970s. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer & Richard Plant. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 496 + illus. £44/$60 Hb;£18.50/$24.95Pb.

Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 1970s. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer & Richard Plant. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 496 + illus. £44/24.95Pb. - Volume 24 Issue 1

Ann Saddlemyer, ed. Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800-1914Ann Saddlemyer and Richard Plant, eds. Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Stages from the First World War to the 1970s

Ann Saddlemyer, ed. <i>Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800-1914</i>Ann Saddlemyer and Richard Plant, eds. <i>Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Stages from the First World War to the 1970s</i>

Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 1970S. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer &amp; Richard Plant. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 496 + illus. £44/$60 Hb; $18.50/$24.95 Pb.

Later Stages: Essays in Ontario Theatre from the First World War to the 1970S. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer &amp; Richard Plant. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 496 + illus. £44/$60 Hb; $18.50/$24.95 Pb.

Noises Off-Right: Theatre in the Toronto Region

In their two-volume chronicle of the history and evolution of the theatre in Ontario from the early 1800s to the early 1970s, aptly titled Early Stages (volume 1) and Later Stages (volume 2), editors Ann Saddlemyer and Richard Plant have constructed a rich collection of essays that traces the development of theatre in the province, beginning with the early, mainly imported touring troupes which led to the advent of early indigenous theatricals produced by numerous amateur companies. These travelling companies explored the theatrical landscape of the period and led the way for the development of plays, playwrights and the birth of a professional Canadian theatre in Ontario. This history ends with the burgeoning of cultural nationalism in the mid-1960s and early ’70s. These two volumes are indispensable guide-posts for anyone attempting a reading of the state of our theatre in 1998. If Early Stages and Later Stages tell us anything about the present stage, it is that Toronto seems to have been destined to become a major centre for theatrical production.

Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800–1914. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Pp. 412 + illus. $40.00; $17.95.

Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800–1914. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Pp. 412 + illus. $40.00; $17.95.

On the Necessity of Criticising Criticism

In this opinion piece, Ann Saddlemyer explores the problems of the critic and theatre historian faced with incomplete evidence from the past and an increasingly unsatisfactory critical terminology for present day theatre, with particular reference to the work of women in Canadian theatre.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge. Edited by ANN SADDLEMYER. Vol. I, 1871–1907, pp. xxx+386; Vol. 2, 1907–1909, pp. xviii+270. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 and 1984. £30 and £25 net. DECLAN KIBERD DECLAN KIBERD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXVII, Issue 146, May 1986, Pages 288–289, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXVII.146.288 Published: 01 May 1986

Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge ed. by Ann Saddlemyer

per cent on the original price should be inflicted on Canadian buyers; but, since the case is all too typical, the long-term effects on scholarly publishing, and even on scholarship and teaching, are alarming to contemplate. n o r m a n p a g e / University of Alberta Ann Saddlemyer, sel. and ed., Theatre Business: The Correspondence of the First Abbey Theatre Directors William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press; London: Colin Smythe Limited, 1982). 330. $20.00 One might be forgiven for wondering what on earth could remain to be said about the formative years of the Abbey Theatre. Surely from the small mountain of monographs and the sea of articles on the subject we know all there is to know. One’s first impression of Professor Saddlemyer’s book is that it would have filled a vacant niche even a decade ago; but that the work of the 1960s and 1970s (some of it Saddlemyer’s own) has rendered it redundant, particularly with the first volume of Synge’s letters already in print (again edited by the indefatigable Saddlemyer). Nevertheless, Theatre Business is a worthwhile volume to rest on the shelf next to Maurice Bour­ geois’s John Millington Synge and the Irish Theatre (1913), Alan Price’s Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama (1961), Brenna Clarke’s The Emergence of the Irish Peasant Play at the Abbey Theatre (1975), E. H. Mikhail’s /. M. Synge: Interviews and Recollections (1977), and Hogan and Kilroy’s The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge igog-igog (1978). Theatre Business is a compilation of the correspondence of the first Abbey Theatre directors: W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge. It observes proper chronology and consistency of presentation: the letters are tran­ scribed in full and in sequence as far as possible (though some remain un­ dated). Saddlemyer’s passion for exactitude has led her to preserve the spelling and punctuation errors of the correspondents; and somehow it does bring us closer to their personalities to know that on occasions Yeats used the spelling “dispise,” and Synge “resussitate,” or that Lady Gregory (whose spelling seems to have been flawless) habitually omitted the possessive apos­ trophe. Nor is this desire for accuracy misplaced. Saddlemyer seems bent on combatting the carelessness of previous scholars; and in particular her book is an important corrective to the serious errors of transcription found in Hogan and Kilroy’s The Abbey Theatre: The Years of Synge. For example, it is illuminating to realize that when Synge was writing to Yeats about the painter Mrs. Taquair he did not call her “Mrs. Maguire” as recorded on 99 p. 72 of Hogan and Kilroy! Unfortunately, however, there is a problem with Saddlemyer’s own transcription of one of Synge’s letters, in which she may have to defer to Hogan and Kilroy. According to their book, Synge, in a letter to Yeats about a play by William Boyle which needed revising, wrote I rather agree with Fay that you would be more likely to get Boyle to put it to rights than Colum. Boyle would be sure to resent in his heart having Colum appointed to direct him. To me that sentence makes more sense than the following, which is Saddle­ myer’s version: I rather agree with Fay that you would be more likely to get Boyle to put it to rights than Colum appointed to direct him. Am I right in sensing an accidental ellipsis here? If, as I suspect, a line of print is missing, it should be re-inserted before a second edition of the book is contemplated. In electing to confine herself to the correspondence of the Abbey’s first directors, Saddlemyer condemns herself and us to a legion of footnotes, whose task is to explain the behaviour of the colourful characters that the letters are mostly about. Indeed, I hope it is no disservice to the mighty trio of writers represented to state that in this instance the more interesting figures seem to be the ones offstage. How one would like to hear from the “starry Fays” (William and Frank), from the dangerous Miss...