Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín

without toothbrushes were getting their revenge.
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    B etween 16 February and 8 March 1909 George Bernard Shaw wrote his own version of The Playboy ; it was a short play called The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet: A Sermon in Crude Melodrama, and it was set in America, Blanco being an unrepentant horse thief with strong views on the Almighty.There were also several foul-mouthed women, and a lot of very funny, sometimes silly and often irreverent and blaspheming dialogue. Like The Playboy, it was deeply objectionable as much in its general tone as in its particulars. Shaw offered it to the actor Beerbohm Tree, who was to get a knighthood within three months. Tree’s concerns about the blasphemy and general immorality in the play were irrelevant because the Lord Chamberlain was prepared to ban the play. The Chamberlain’s remit did not extend to Dublin, however, and when Shaw handed the script to Lady Gregory, she took it to Yeats and they decided to produce it at the Abbey.
    This would prove, if anyone needed proof (and indeed some did), that the Abbey Theatre would oppose censorship from every quarter. Yeats and Lady Gregory had stood up to the rabble; now they would, with the same hauteur and moral authority, stand up to Dublin Castle. In August 1909 Lady Gregory herself directed the play while Yeats stayed at Coole; it was the first play she had directed alone. Soon, the authorities wrote to her: “The play does not deal with an Irish subject, and it is not an Irish play in any other sense than that its author was born in Ireland. It is now proposed to produce this play in the Abbey Theatre which was founded for the express purpose of encouraging dramatic art in Ireland and of fostering a dramatic school growing out of the life of the country.” It waspointed out that the fact that the censor’s remit did not extend to Dublin was “an accidental freedom”. Lady Gregory was warned that the theatre could lose its patent.
    In Our Irish Theatre, Lady Gregory described with great relish the meetings she had with the authorities. She must have enjoyed telling James Dougherty, the Under-Secretary, that “the subject of the play is a man, a horse-thief, shaking his fist at Heaven, and finding afterwards that Heaven is too strong for him. If there were no defiance, there could be no victory. It is the same theme that Milton has taken in Satan’s defiance in Paradise Lost.” At a further meeting which Yeats attended, Dougherty “implored us … to save the Lord Lieutenant from his delicate position”. “Can you suggest no way out?” he asked. “None, except our being left alone,” they told him. “Oh Lady Gregory,” he said, “appeal to your own common sense.” Both Dougherty and the Lord Lieutenant himself, Lord Aberdeen, were interested in drama and also in favour of Home Rule. They were a symptom of England’s weakening hold on Ireland. They were easy pickings.
    Shaw wrote opposing a private performance: “Threaten that we shall be suppressed; that we shall be made martyrs of; that we shall suffer as much and as publicly as possible. Tell them that they can depend on me to burn with a brighter blaze than all Foxe’s martyrs.” Finally, when the Castle threatened to forbid the performance of the play,Yeats and Lady Gregory, realizing what was at stake – they would lose their patent and be fined –  “very sadly … agreed that we must give up the fight. We did not say a word of this at the Abbey but went on rehearsing as usual.”
    It is difficult to imagine them making a decision to give up the fight, who had never given one up before. It makes for a better story, however, especially one with such a triumphant ending. “When we had left the Theatre,” Lady Gregory wrote, “and were walking through the lamp-lighted streets, we found that during those two or three hours our minds had come to the same