Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín

conventional standards. Besides, she has never been part of the artist’s world, she has belonged to a political world, or one that is merely social.” In his categories of people in his book A Vision , he placed her with John Galsworthy and Queen Victoria. (“But I don’t think she could have written ‘Seven Short Plays’,” Lady Gregory commented.) In 1931, when Lady Gregory was in Dublin for medical treatment and was staying with the Yeatses, George Yeats, who had married W.B. Yeats in 1917, wrote to Dorothy Shakespear, who was married to Ezra Pound: “Since then – that’s eleven days ago – life has been a perpetual fro and to and to and fro … Christ, how she repeats herself … she’ll tell you the same saga quite literally three times in less than an hour, and repeats it the next day, and the day after that too.”
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    A s the new Irish state came into being, both Lady Gregory and Yeats needed all their social and political skills to ensure the survival of the Abbey and indeed their own survival. Yeats became a senator in the Free State and during the Civil War needed an armed guard on his house. Lady Gregory refused an offer of a seat in the Senate atfirst and then in 1925 let her name go forward for election, but did no canvassing and was not elected. She was alone at Coole for some of the time watching the children of her peaceful tenants becoming radical and unruly. She wrote to Yeats: “I think the division in politics draws a pretty clear line between fathers and sons about here.” In 1920, when she saw six or eight young men in her woods and they did not stop when she told them to, she wrote in her journal: “I felt terribly upset – it seemed like what we had heard of the French Revolution as it began and lately in Russia, the peasants making themselves free of the woods.” Two years later, when a tenant made demands on her, she showed him “how easy it would be to shoot me through the unshuttered window if he wanted to use violence”. Yeats referred to this in “Beautiful Lofty Things”:
    Augusta Gregory seated at her great ormolu table,
    Her eightieth winter approaching: ‘Yesterday he threatened my life.
    I told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table,
    The blinds drawn up’ […]
    During the Civil War Lady Gregory had a mastectomy and spent time recovering at the Yeatses’ house in Merrion Square. With Yeats, she saw a great deal of the first government , even though her secret sympathies lay with the republican side. As the new state was formed, Yeats andLady Gregory decided the best way to ensure the theatre’s future was to offer it to the state; there were many discussions and negotiations. In the end, it was decided that the state would subsidize the theatre, rather than take it over, but the price of the subsidy was a government representative , the economist George O’Brien, on the board of the theatre. This was the context in which Yeats and Lady Gregory’s last great battle about censorship and freedom of expression would take place.
    In August 1925 O’Casey submitted his new play The Plough and the Stars , which dealt with Easter Week 1916, to the Abbey. Yeats and Lennox Robinson and Lady Gregory liked the play (“she is an extraordinarily broad-minded woman”, O’Casey wrote to a friend) and it was to be staged in February 1926. By early September there were problems. One of the players wrote to Lady Gregory: “At any time I would think twice before having anything to do with it. The language is – to use an Abbey phrase – beyond the beyonds. The song at the end of the second Act sung by the ‘girl-of-the-streets’ is impossible.” In rehearsal some of the actors objected to individual lines, one having been forbidden by her confessor to say them. The play allowed Irish nationalists to mix with prostitutes; it also