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George Moore’s fifth play Diarmuid and Grania was written with William Butlet Yeats for the Irish Literary Theatre. It premiered at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on 21 October 1901.

Diarmuid and Grania Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats and George Moore, edited by J. C. C. Mays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) offers a thorough textual analysis of the authors’ dispersed manuscripts. No definitive edition of the play has been published, nor does one seem feasible.

Professor Mays’s introduction describes the genesis, production, and quiet afterlife of Diarmuid and Grania. The play originally appeared in Dublin Magazine (Volume XXVI, Number 2, April-June 1951) with an introduction by the play’s American editor, Bill Becker.

William J. Becker (1927-2015) was a Rhodes Scholar and doctoral student at Oxford University when he edited a typescript that George Moore had shared with Lady Cunard years before.

The Moore-Cunard version contains inconsistencies and errors, which Becker compounded and added to, while, at his instruction, the printer regularized the text. (Mays, page lxii)

The typescript transcribed by Becker is tagged “HRC” in Mays’s Census of Manuscripts (pages xx-xxi). Other typescripts that Moore shared with Lady Cunard are tagged HRC (1), HRC (2), and HRC (3) in the Census (pages xix-xx), and they too have been used problematically (by others). All of the typescripts are at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Despite its purported defects, GMi publishes Diarmuid and Grania from Dublin Magazine because it is the first edition.

The curation of other editions of Diarmuid and Grania, reflecting Professor Mays’s diligent research, may more truly embody each author’s discrete and somewhat divergent literary aims.

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Acts

1901-10-21 — Diarmuid and Grania — Act 1

1901-10-21 — Diarmuid and Grania — Act 2

1901-10-21 — Diarmuid and Grania — Act 3

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Diarmuid and Grania (AI)

Diarmuid and Grania (AI) is a PDF of the first edition that may be uploaded to AI applications such as Notebook LM for guided analysis and interpretation.