“If the theatre ceases to be licensed, as pointed out above, and any performance for gain takes place there, the penalty under the 26. Geo. III. cap 57, sec. (2) is £300 for each offence, to be recovered in a ‘qui tam’ action; one half of the £300 going to the Rotunda Hospital, the other half to the informer who sues.”
Mr. Yeats and I were just going to a rehearsal at the Abbey on the evening of August 21st when we received a letter from the Castle, telling us that a formal legal document, forbidding the performance of the play, would reach us immediately. The matter had now become a very grave one. We knew that we should, if we went on and this threat were carried out, lose not only the Patent but that the few hundred pounds that we had been able to save and with which we could have supported our players till they found other work, would be forfeited. This thought of the players made us waver, and very sadly we agreed that we must give up the fight. We did not say a word of this at the Abbey but went on rehearsing as usual. When we had left the Theatre and were walking through the lamp-lighted streets, we found that during those two or three hours our minds had come to the same decision, that we had given our word, that at all risks we must keep it or it would never be trusted again; that we must in no case go back, but must go on at any cost.
We wrote a statement in which we told of the pressure put upon us and the objections made, but of these last we said: “there is nothing to change our conviction that so far from containing offence for any sincere and honest mind, Mr. Shaw’s play is a high and weighty argument upon the working of the Spirit of God in man’s heart, or to show that it is not a befitting thing for us to set upon our stage the work of an Irishman, who is also the most famous of living dramatists, after that work has been silenced in London by what we believe an unjust decision.
“One thing” we continued, “is plain enough, an issue that swallows up all else and makes the merit of Mr. Shaw’s play a secondary thing. If our Patent is in danger, it is because the decisions of the English Censor are being brought into Ireland, and because the Lord Lieutenant is about to revive, on what we consider a frivolous pretext, a right not exercised for a hundred and fifty years to forbid, at the Lord Chamberlain’s pleasure, any play produced in any Dublin theatre, all these theatres holding their Patents from him.
“We are not concerned with the question of the English Censorship now being fought out in London, but we are very certain that the conditions of the two countries are different, and that we must not, by accepting the English Censor’s ruling, give away anything of the liberty of the Irish Theatre of the future. Neither can we accept without protest the revival of the Lord Lieutenant’s claim at the bidding of the Censor or otherwise. The Lord Lieutenant is definitely a political personage, holding office from the party in power, and what would sooner or later grow into a political Censorship cannot be lightly accepted.”
Having sent this out for publication, we went on with our rehearsals.
In rehearsal I came to think that there was a passage that would really seem irreverent and give offence to the genuinely religious minds we respect. It was where Blanco said: “Yah! What about the croup? I guess He made the croup when He was thinking of one thing; and then He made the child when He was thinking of something else; and the croup got past Him and killed the child. Some of us will have to find out how to kill the croup, I guess. I think I’ll turn doctor just on the chance of getting back on Him by doing something He couldn’t do.”
I wrote to Mr. Shaw about this, and he answered in this very interesting letter:
“Parknasilla, 19 August, 1909.
“I have just arrived and found all your letters waiting for me. I am naturally much entertained by your encounters and Yeats’ with the Castle. I leave that building cheerfully in your hands.