Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/139

Rh to find a foreshadowing of the playwright in the mystical poet as it would be to see in all but all of the essays of "The Treasure of the Humble," any proof that their author was a playwright. To those who knew Mr. Russell only through his verses, and were unaware of the versatility of the man, his turning dramatist was as surprising as Emerson turned dramatist would have been to the America of anti-slavery days.

It was not, of course, because of an impulse from within that Mr. Russell attempted drama in "Deirdre" (1902), but because the young enthusiasts of Ireland's national literary movement wanted plays that should be at once native in quality and the work of writers of standing. It did not seem a strange request to Cumann nan Gaedheal to ask Mr. Russell for a play. What if he had never written a play? He was hardly in their estimation more of an amateur than Mr. Yeats or Mr. Moore or Mr. Martyn, who had written plays for "The Irish Literary Theatre" that had achieved success of a kind, and he was surely as ardent a Nationalist as any of these. So he was asked for a play to be played at the Spring Festival of 1902 by the Irish National Dramatic Company that was forming, and he did what he was asked to do, blocking it all out in six hours, and finishing it sufficiently in three days for it to be put in rehearsal. It was in the summer following its first presentation that I saw it again in rehearsal in a little hall back of a produce shop in Dublin, and got to know Mr. Russell as playwright before I read his play. One of the actors, himself maker of verses and plays, gave me his copy of "Deirdre," with cues marked. I had seen