“10 Adelphi Terrace, W. C. 12th August, 1909.
“Your news is almost too good to be true. If the Lord Lieutenant would only forbid an Irish play without reading it, and after it had been declared entirely guiltless and admirable by the leading high class journal on the side of his own party [The Nation], forbid it at the command of an official of the King’s household in London, then the green flag would indeed wave over Abbey Street, and we should have questions in Parliament and all manner of reverberating advertisement and nationalist sympathy for the Theatre.
“I gather from your second telegram that the play has, perhaps, been submitted for approval. If so, that will be the worse for us, as the Castle can then say they forbade it on its demerits without the slightest reference to the Lord Chamberlain.
“In any case, do not threaten them with a contraband 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 and louder yells than all Foxe’s martyrs.”
Mr. Shaw telegraphed his answer to the demand for cuts:
“The Nation article gives particulars of cuts demanded, which I refused as they would have destroyed the religious significance of the play. The line about moral relations is dispensable as they are mentioned in several other places; so it can be cut if the Castle is silly enough to object to such relations being called immoral, but I will cut nothing else. It is an insult to the Lord Lieutenant to ignore him and refer me to the requirements of a subordinate English Official. I will be no party to any such indelicacy. Please say I said so, if necessary.”
I give in the [Appendix] the Nation article to which he refers. My next letter home says:
“August 14. Having received the telegram from Shaw and the Nation article, we went to the Castle to see the Official, but only found his secretary, who offered to speak to him through a telephone, but the telephone was wheezy, and after long trying, all we could arrive at was that he wanted to know if we had seen Sir H. Beerbohm Tree’s evidence, in which he said there were passages in Blanco that would be better out. Then he proposed our going to see him at his house, as he has gout and rheumatism and couldn’t come to us.