Overview

At the age of twenty-three, Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was one of the founding fathers of the Abbey Theatre. His contribution to the development of Irish drama continued until his voluntary exile to America in 1914. His play, Broken Soil (1903), was the first commercial success at the Abbey, and it established the long-lived tradition of the peasant play on the Irish stage. This collection comprises the three major forms of his dramatic art: The Land (1905); Betrayal (1912); and two of his five Noh plays (a five-play cycle containing poetry and prose following the Yeats and Japanese Model), Glendalough (based on the career of Charles Stewart Parnell), and Monasterboice (based on the early life of Colum’s lifelong friend, James Joyce).

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9780815631330

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Reviews

An interesting selection of four Colum plays, including three never before published. . . . Sternlicht's introduction provides a concise, accurate history of Colum's theatrical career, from his early nationalistic period through his middle unproductive years as a playwright in the United States and on the continent, to his more rewarding return to Irish themes in the last cycle of five plays in the Noh tradition. . . . Colum was no Irish Willy Loman, to be mourned for what he could have been. Neither did he ever lose his gift for touching the heart and the mind of his audience, as his last plays and poems attest.--James Joyce Supplement

Author Information

Sanford Sternlicht teaches dramatic literature and theory in the Department of English at Syracuse University. He is the author of A Reader's Guide to Modern Irish Drama, A Reader's Guide to Modern Ameiican Drama, A Reader's Guide to Modern British Drama, and coeditor of three volumes of New Plays from the Abbey Theatre.

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