A64 Diarmuid and Grania

Table of Contents

A64-a First edition

Title Page

Launch

Description

Contents

A64-2a The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats

A64-3a First separate American edition

A64-a First edition

Title Page

DIARMUID AND GRANIA

A Play in Three Acts

BY

GEORGE MOORE

AND

W.B. YEATS

Now first printed

With an introductory note

BY

William Becker

rule

[Reprinted from The Dublin Magazine, APRIL-JUNE, 1951]

Launch

Issued April 1951 in an edition of 25 copies for private distribution by Dr. James Starkey, who as Seumas O’Sullivan edited the Dublin Magazine.

Description

Height: 9 1/2 in; 9.5 in; 24.13 cm

Width: 7 in; 17.78 cm

[A]8, B8, C4, [D]1; pp 42, comprising:

• title page, p [1];
• introductory note by the editor pp 2-4;
• text pp [5]-41;
• p [42] blank;
• no endpapers;
• all edges trimmed;
• wire stapled;
• issued in light gray (which in some cases has discolored to a light tan) overlapping wrappers,
• back and spine plain, lettered in black on front

DIARMUID AND GRANIA

A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

BY GEORGE MOORE AND

W. B. YEATS : : : : :

Reprinted from THE DUBLIN MAGAZINE

VOL. XXVI. (New Series), April-June, 1951

Contents

A letter from GM to Yeats (8 August 1901) is included in the editor’s introductory note. The text of the play is from a typescript, with manuscript corrections by both GM and Yeats, which had been given to Mr. J. Millward, its present owner, by Lady Cunard, who presumably had it from GM.

The play was presented by the F. R. Benson Company at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, 21 October 1901, for the Irish Literary Theatre. The song, “There Are Seven that Pull the Thread” with words by Yeats and music by Edward Elgar, published in 1902, is not present in this version.

GM in Ave (A31:I-a) and Yeats in Dramatis Personae 1896-1902 (New York, and London, 1936) have left accounts of their collaboration. GM gives six pages of the dialogue as written by him in French, to be translated into Gaelic and thence into English, “to convince the reader that two such literary lunatics as Yeats and myself existed,” he explains. The scene given in Ave is also missing from this text. In the first issue of Samhain, October 1901, Yeats stated in writing of the forthcoming production of Diarmuid and Grama, “the first scene is in the great banqueting hall of Tara, and the second and third on the slopes of Ben Bulben in Sligo.” As printed here, the first and last scenes are as noted by Yeats, but the second one is “Diarmuid’s house.”

Two other typescripts with numerous manuscript corrections, many of them in the handwriting of GM or Yeats, are in the library of the University of Texas at Austin, and were used by Ray Small as the basis of a critical edition of Diarmuid and Grania in an unpublished University of Texas doctoral thesis. Dr. Small informs Edwin Gilcher that his “final text does not differ a great deal” from the above. He does not, however, agree with Mr. William Becker’s attribution of the original scenario of the play to Lady Gregory, and presents evidence in his thesis that Yeats wrote the scenario in collaboration with GM, conclusively demonstrating that “Yeats supplied the story, that the construction and dialogue were primarily Moore’s work, and that Yeats made the final decisions concerning revisions.”

A64-2a The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats

This version of Diarmuid and Grania, including the editor’s introductory note, is included (pp 1168-1222) in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London, and The Macmillan Company, New York, 1966.

A64-3a First separate American edition

The play, edited and with an “Introduction” by Anthony Farrow, was published as Volume X of the “Irish Drama Series”, DePaul University, Chicago, 1974. There are only slight variations from previous printings and, according to the editor, this edition “maintains the basic integrity of the 1951 printing, with only cosmetic changes.”