Reconstructing name : Lady Gregory's tragic Irish heroine

Abstract

This thesis discusses the development of historian, folklorist and dramatist Lady Gregory's dramatic technique in regard to her Folk-History plays, Kincora I and II, Dervorgilla, and Grania. The focus of the thesis is on how Lady Gregory dealt with an overwhelming wealth of history and folklore, which proved unwieldy for the stage. Faced with the problems of staging too many characters, changing too many settings, and having the stories of ancient Irish culture be lost among the morass, she began to trim away what was not necessary while re-assimilating the important aspects into a dramatic plot that focuses on the main characters. This task entailed the development of a new technique in Lady Gregory's Folk-History dramas, as she read how the history and folklore informed each other in order to come to a more realized understanding of who she was dealing with and how they may have acted. In her investigations of ancient history and folklore. Lady Gregory learned that the heroines of her plays. Queens Gormleith, Dervorgilla and Grania, were written down, but not quite out, of the ancient accounts, thereby losing status in public consciousness. As she attempted to give fuller representations to her characters, she found that the stories of these women were as critical as the stories of the men they dealt with, but were yet untold from what may have been the heroine's perspective. Lady Gregory took it upon herself to discover these stories amongst the history and folklore, to consider how much of their stories were told and what was not, and to re-conceive the stories for the Abbey Theatre's stage. The result is three plays depicting heroines of Irish culture playing their essential roles in the formation of a cultural identification along with their with ancient mythic and historic hero counterparts. This thesis begins by discussing Lady Gregory's Folk-History project and the techniques she employs to distil and discern the dramatic narratives of these heroines. It then considers and compares the development of the 1905 Kincora play to the 1909 version, examines the technique of Dervorgilla, and shows how Lady Gregory's project reaches its culmination in Grania.