This book is a collection of short plays penned by a woman named Lady Gregory. She was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theater manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies.

THE STORIES: EAT CAKE. A biting satire in which a frowzy housewife, absorbed in her TV is visited by an eccentric rapist--whose demands are somewhat different from what might be anticipated. (1 man, 1 woman.) HAROLD. Two doctors examine a patient (p

THE STORIES: SWAN SONG. An actor wakes up with a hangover, locked in the theater after the evening's performance. He is terrified when he thinks a ghost appears, but it is only the theater's prompter. The actor tells him stories of his life and als

A fierce mirth characterizes antic Irish comedy. To the degree to which everyone sympathizes with the need to mock repressive authority, everyone is potentially Irish. It is the Irish dramatists themselves, says David Krause, that are the true authors of the profane book of Irish comedy. The body of literature they have produced desecrates the sacred in Ireland and launches a sardonic attack on the queen of Irish nationalism, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the old sow who, according to Joyce's tragicomic jest, tries to devour her creative farrow. Krause discusses the major works of fourteen Irish playwrights—Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Dion Boucicault, William Boyle, Paul Vincent Carroll, George Fitzmaurice, Lady Gregory, Denis Johnston, Sean O'Casey, Lennox Robinson, Bernard Shaw, George Shields, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats—and shows the ways in which these works are linked, emotionally and thematically, to early Gaelic literature and the tradition of the mythic pagan playboy Oisin or Usheen. As the last great pagan hero of Ireland, Oisin emerges as an archetype for the many playboys and paycocks of Irish comedy. Oisin was the antithesis of St. Patrick, the first great Christian saint of Ireland, who, condemning pleasure and threatening eternal damnation, came to represent all authority. The bearers of this dark and wild Celtic tradition, which Synge and O'Casey associated with a daimonic or barbarous impulse, laugh irreverently at their own creations. This laughter, the laughter of the culture's mythmakers, brings with it emotional relief, comic catharsis.