ABSTRACT
When the newly constructed Abbey Theatre applied for its fi rst patent in 1904, Yeats warned his advocate, Horace Plunkett, that the author’s association with Kathleen ni Houlihan “may perhaps raise a diffi culty” for the theatre’s relationship with Dublin Castle because, although the play had been “a great success” for the Theatre, “It may be said that it is a political play of a propagandist kind” (Letters III; 622-3).1 In the same letter, Yeats goes on to assure Plunkett that these hypothetical allegations would be completely unfounded: “I have never written a play to advocate any kind of opinion, and I think such a play would necessarily be bad art, or at any rate a very humble kind of art. At the same time, I feel that I have no right to exclude for myself or for others, any of the passionate material of drama” (ibid 623). This combined warning and justifi cation perfectly encapsulates Yeats’s mixed emotions about Kathleen and the nationalist community that, to his mind, was responsible for its reputation. By acknowledging the “passionate material” of his plays, which in this case includes an apparent endorsement of military revolution in Ireland, Yeats suggests that the nationalist audience’s emotional response to Kathleen ni Houlihan was elicited by design. Yet, at the same time, he immediately chafes at the notion that his work, and by extension its author and his theatre, might be associated with any concrete political agenda on the basis of that response.
