“I had to condense, expand, heighten, subdue, rearrange—in a word I had to retell them”:[1] so Padraic Colum, a leading playwright in the early days of Dublin’s Abbey Theater, described his technique for transforming scattered fragments of Pacific island folk tales into a multivolume literary collection published in 1924, The Legends of Hawaii.[2] It was not the first time he had drawn upon this method. A decade earlier the dramatist had employed it when he inscribed an Irish English adaptation of one of the medieval theater’s jewels, the Wakefield cycle’s The Second Shepherds’ Play. Little did he realize that with his “condensing” and “rearranging,” he was taking the first steps along a literary path that was to sustain him for the rest of his career, that of an author of children’s literature. A transcription of the holograph containing Colum’s adaptation is presented here for the first time.

Composed during the first half of the fifteenth century, The Second Shepherds’ Play has long been considered the first dramatic comedy in the English language. It’s one of thirteen works that make up the Towneley, or Wakefield, Mysteries, a series of plays thought to have been performed by the local guilds of Wakefield, in southern Yorkshire. It was written in a regional vernacular and noted for exploiting dialect difference, as a brief flourish of Southern dialect is injected into an otherwise Northern idiom for comic effect.[3] Its scenes, too, are among the earliest in the theatrical tradition to contain, “a color and intensity […] taken right out of the common life of the lower English folk.”[4] Colum’s adaptation retains these scenes of rural life and reference as well as the vernacular features of the original. But it does so with a significant difference. Other twentieth-century versions of the Wakefield Mystery have modernized its language, moving it away from a localized regional variety toward a more generalized written standard. Colum’s, however, renders the dialogue into a lilting form of Irish English—that is, from one dialect to another, from one rural geographic variety to another, from Northern to Irish English. Among modernizations, it is unique.

The particulars of the playwright’s reworking are sketchy. During an interview in 1969, he spoke of the initial impetus coming from William Butler Yeats who, according to his recollection, suggested he prepare a version for the Abbey audience.[5] Colum offered no further elaboration. A few clues, however—enough at least to reconstruct a likely scenario—are provided by some of the circumstances surrounding Yeats’s request.

A decade earlier in 1902, Douglas Hyde, a key figure of the Gaelic Revival, had composed An Naomh ar Iarraidh (The Lost Saint), a contemporary miracle play drawn from the Irish manuscript tradition. Within a few months, this time with the medieval English mystery play as his inspiration, he wrote Dráma Breithe Chríosta (The Nativity Play). Its script appeared in the Weekly Freeman, a Dublin newspaper, appropriately enough at Christmastide, accompanied by Augusta Gregory’s Irish English version. Hyde’s plays were often quickly inscribed and formulaic: a simple setting and a small number of characters. As such they proved “admirably suited for performance by children,” and some were apparently arranged so that groups of youngsters could appear on stage.[6] His nativity script, however, managed to draw the clerical establishment’s ire. As a result, even though composed in 1902, the play was not produced until January of 1911. Despite the decade delay, its performance, like that of its predecessor, “charmed both reviewers and audiences.”[7]

The year 1911 marked a transition period for the Abbey. During the winter, the main body of players was preparing to debut the fall season in America. In their absence, a second Abbey company was created under Nugent Monck, a director committed to reviving medieval English drama. The theater had recently been struggling to draw the Dublin audience, to rekindle the enthusiasm it had generated earlier on. With the success of Hyde’s Nativity Play in January, coupled with the direction then afforded by Monck’s arrival later in the year, Yeats may have been preparing a way to revitalize the Abbey’s season. Together the two events could have come together to induce Colum to convert another nativity play at Christmas, this time the fifteenth-century The Second Shepherds’ Play.[8]       

Monck had come to Dublin not only to direct but also to establish a new drama school at the Abbey. The theater announced in September 1911 that “classes for dramatic training”[9]—namely, lessons in elocution, gesture, acting, rehearsing, and singing designed for medieval productions—were to be scheduled from October 10th until December 19th. Although their program was not yet complete, students from the school were the first to perform Colum’s The Second Shepherds’ Play: it premiered on the evening of November 23rd, coupled with Monck’s well-publicized lecture, “The Rise of the Mystery Plays,” introducing Dublin theatergoers to the medieval performance tradition. The arrangement proved apt. The following day, a review in the Irish Independent praised the actors, “all of whom have reached a high level, and whose performance reflects the greatest credit on the school and its able director.”[10] The new version ran again on November 24th and 25th, and was included in the January 1912 program “as a special attraction.”[11] There it played alongside Hyde’s Nativity Play, itself “much appreciated.”[12] Colum’s refashioning was then chosen to open the Abbey’s next season in October 1912, having “proved to be the most dramatic and interesting of all the Mystery Plays produced last year.”[13]

It is not unlikely that after witnessing the success of Hyde’s unsophisticated Nativity at the beginning of the year, Colum was not inclined to render the full complexity of the original but rather a much-reduced edition. As a comparison of the two attests, the “condensing” and “rearranging” he would speak of later in regards to Legends of Hawaii were much in evidence. Given the Wakefield play’s complicated poetics, Colum’s adaptation required skill and delicacy. A mere dialect rendering would not be enough. Irish writers, then as now, were reluctant to portray characters whose speech could be labeled “stage Irish.”[14] More would be required.

Of all the Abbey playwrights, Colum may have been selected to fashion the Northern dialogue into a fitting Irish English vernacular because of his likely success in doing so. A few years earlier, his play The Land (1905) had become the first Abbey production with broad appeal, and it was so ranked in no small part because of its linguistic similitude:

Colum’s dialect is admirable. It lives, which is everything. It is strong, colored, subtle, and early rises into lyricism. […] No play yet produced in the Abbey Theatre has so gripped and held captive an audience. […] Mr. Colum has caught up his play out of the mid-current of actual Irish life.[15]

In a New Yorker interview a decade before his death, the author himself described his vernacular advantage over other Abbey dramatists:

In those days sixty years ago […] it was the fashion to be writing stories and plays in the country speech. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, and all were doing it, but the truth of the matter is that I was the only one of the lot that knew what the real country speech sounded like.[16]

When Yeats approached the playwright to adapt the fifteenth-century mystery play, this was probably the capacity that he was relying upon. He was not likely to be disappointed.[17]

The reworking follows the main order of the original, but as noted with extensive simplification. The lengthy and rigid Middle English poetic form was replaced by a shortened but highly alliterative Irish English prose. It also contains a significantly reduced number of scenes and lines, the latter being abridged by about two-thirds. Of those that have been retained, a few are repeated almost verbatim from the original text: “Bot we must drynk as we brew,” appears (initially) as “But then we must drink as we brew”; “hys noyse was brokyn,” as “his nose was broken,” and so on. However, the vast majority have been skillfully attuned to Irish English colloquialisms. Some are unique, like turning a line with Christological salience prefacing a lament about marriage partners, “By hym that dyed for vs all,” into a secular exclamation, “By the pigs!” Most are turned into familiar poetic markers of Irish English: “a bit and sup” (greim agus bolgam); “Go out again, you” (calques); “the thing that is in it” (prepositional verbs), and the like.

Clearly, the characters’ banter was intended to be the play’s strong point. Perhaps as a result, the simplification of its plot could be passed over—the lilt of the dialogue and not the intricacies of the action could be expected to lift the audience and carry them along on a light poetic breeze.

Colum’s radical attenuation derives, no doubt, from a variety of factors. One, perhaps the most obvious, is that it followed in the wake of Hyde’s Nativity Play, whose own simplified structure may have been perceived as underlying its popular success. As such, his decision to follow the same format could have been, in part, an effort to revive theater’s fading appeal to the Dublin audience. Two other factors, more subtle, can be drawn from a close study of the manuscript. The first is its omission of a shepherd’s scatological response to the thief’s feigning of a prestigious Southern dialect: “take outt that sothern toothe, and sett in a torde!” (“Take out that southern tooth and set it in a turd!”) The second is its revision of the phrase, “we must drink as we brew,” cited earlier. In Colum’s autograph the words “drink” and “brew,” both of which appear in the medieval text, have been lined out, and the terms “bake” and “eat,” respectively, have been inscribed to replace them, yielding “we must eat as we bake.”

All three of these changes to the original—the radical simplification of the plot, the omission of “torde,” and the revision of “drink/brew” into “bake/eat”—suggest that as he inscribed his version of The Second Shepherds’ Play, the playwright may have had a child audience in mind. If he did, these are the sort of changes that would appear prudent; that is, he would need to take care to present material suitable for the young. Convoluted lengthy plots, scatological terms, and age-inappropriate metaphors—these would not be proper fare. This is, of course, speculative. Yet, it finds support in the following two points. First, recent scholarship has shown that from the last half of the nineteenth century and extending well into the opening decade of the twentieth, Irish children emerged as an ever-expanding audience for literary publications, both in Irish[18] and in English.[19] That an Abbey playwright near the height of his powers could prepare material aimed at a young audience would thus not be all that unusual. And second, within two years of his adaptation, Colum composed A Boy in Éirinn, a lengthy children’s story which went through six editions and an Irish translation. Then, after his emigration to America in 1914, a purview of his writing attests a dominant, though not exclusive, concern with young people’s literature. It began with a series of stories written for the children’s column of the New York Sunday Tribune, and solidified in 1916 with publication of his first collection of children’s tales, The King of Ireland’s Son, published in both New York and London, along with translations into Irish and German.[20]

A recent study of his literary output—one appearing on the centennial of his Second Shepherds’ inscription—concurs that after 1911 his main occupation was as an author of children’s literature. Before that date, he had produced almost without exception plays, poems, and a few sketches, but after that date, the vast majority of his publications were reworkings of stories that in their original form were far more lengthy and far more complex. Long after his prudent adaptation of the Wakefield Mystery, Colum continued a practice preeminent in it; namely, keeping the plots of his stories and the dynamics of his language, even when formal, within the reach of a youthful audience.[21]

If this analysis is correct, the playwright’s new career began while still at the Abbey Theater. In redacting Wakefield’s The Second Shepherds’ Play, he developed his new method: carving literature from works as complex as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and as fragmented as Irish mythology and Hawaiian folk tales, by condensing, expanding, heightening, subduing, and rearranging—in short, by retelling them for young readers. The 1911 autograph transcribed here, then, marks a milestone in Colum’s literary vocation, his progression from an Irish Renaissance poet and playwright to an author of literature composed for the world of children.

Note on the Manuscript

There is little doubt that the autograph housed in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library, derives from the Abbey production of November 1911. It is written in ink on thirteen faded sheets of heavy-stock ivory-colored composition paper, each of which displays, under light, a triple watermark: the phrase “Court Royal” in double-outline, ten vertical rib or wire lines, and a large rose insignia surrounded by an array of shamrocks.[22]

The play itself has escaped all critical comment, and there appears to be no record its being published. The bibliographies of the Colum’s work give no indication of its existence even as a manuscript.[23] Perhaps it has been overlooked because much of the material associated with the Abbey Theater was destroyed in the fire of 1951. At least one of his plays disappeared in that blaze.[24] Or perhaps because the myriad outlets in which he published his vast number of texts have made uncovering the breadth and depth of his corpus unusually complex.

This is a reader’s edition in that the usual accidentals like false starts, missing punctuation, and so on have been emended for ease of reading. However, a few of the playwright’s revisions have been so marked. These include occasional material that was simply deleted outright. Also included are lines that were lined out only to reappear nearby and words that were altered. The former lines witness the author’s effort to enhance his line’s narrative effectiveness; the latter his search for “le mot juste.” Occasionally, role assignments were revised to clarify the dialogue. For example, in the opening scene, as the 1st and 2nd shepherd discuss the whereabouts of the 3rd who has yet to arrive on stage, the line, “He’s late coming,” was initially given to the tardy 3rd. Colum lined out “3rd” and replaced it with “1st.” All these, together with a handful of Irish English spellings, are judged rare enough not to interfere with the reading, but important enough to give a visceral feel for the playwright’s composing process. To review them is to catch his text on the fly, as it happens, before it loses its tentative, fluid quality.[25]

The play below is reproduced with generous permission of the Estate of Padraic Colum. The author and the editors wish to thank especially Clíona Ní Shúilleanáin and Huw Shúilleanáin for their support.