Introduction

This book examines the versions of Irish identity proposed by the drama of William Butler Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge.1 Through close analysis of the plays Yeats, Gregory, and Synge wrote for the Irish National Theatre, the following chapters examine the ways that these three authors engaged the confl icted ideology of Irish nationalism and projected onto their audiences a new national consciousness based on what they identifi ed as the fundamental characteristics of Irish speech, history, and custom. In both of these functions, Yeats, Gregory, and Synge relied equally on the discourses of nationalism and modernism to construct a nationality that was coherent and identifi able, but remained perpetually unfi nished and thus could only be recognized through constant analysis and reinterpretation. In this way, the authors not only included the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy to which they belonged within the newly imagined nation, but they also placed themselves as authors at the very center of that nation.