The King's Threshold; and On Baile's Strand

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE SECRET ROSE. THE CELTIC TWILIGHT. POEMS. THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS. THE SHADOWY WATERS. IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL.
PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE VOLUME III.
LONDON: A. H. BULLEN, 47, GREAT RUSSELL STREET, W.C. 1904
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

Both these plays have been written for Mr. Fay’s “Irish National Theatre.” “The King’s Threshold” was played in October, 1903, and “On Baile’s Strand” will be played in February or March, 1904. Both are founded on Old Irish Prose Romances, but I have borrowed some ideas for the arrangement of my subject in “The King’s Threshold” from “Sancan the Bard,” a play published by Mr. Edwin Ellis some ten years ago.
W. B. Y.
An Old Man with a red dressing-gown, red slippers and red nightcap, holding a brass candlestick with a guttering candle in it, comes on from side of stage and goes in front of the dull green curtain.
Old Man.
Seanchan had died at the end of it, and the king had the guilt at his door, for that might have served the poet’s cause better in the end. But that is not true, for if he that is in the story but a shadow and an image of poetry had not risen up from the death that threatened him, the ending would not have been true and joyful enough to be put into the voices of players and proclaimed in the mouths of trumpets, and poetry would have been badly served.
And as to what happened Seanchan after, my nephew told me he didn’t know, and the poet didn’t know, and it’s likely there’s nobody that knows. But my nephew thinks he never sat down at the king’s table again, after the way he had been treated, but that he went to some quiet green place in the hills with Fedelm, his sweetheart, where the poor people made much of him because he was wise, and where he made songs and poems, and it’s likely enough he made some
of the old songs and the old poems the poor people on the hillsides are saying and singing to-day.